by Dr. Christy Rodriguez de Conte

In LeMoyne Art’s most recent show, “Eden Altered,” on display through May 13, artist Linda Hall reflects on the legacy left by humans that have created chaos on our beautiful earth.

As a native Floridian, my relationship with climate change is very personal. Thus, I share how I spent my latest rainstorm in Florida. The rain was Forrest Gump style, “little bitty rain, stinging rain, big ol’ fat rain,” and the rain just seemed to keep rising.

It rose right up to our doorstep and into the hallway. After moving furniture and using a vacuum to suck up the water, we eventually found humor in the sadness and took the party outside to float down the river that had begun to flow in our street.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the harsh realities of the effects of climate change in Florida are threefold: the state has warmed more than one degree during the last century, our seas are rising approximately one inch per decade, and our rainstorms are becoming more severe and frequent. This directly affects our swamps, wildlife, and experience of existence.

Though we may feel helpless, those in our community aim to bring us face-to-face with our destruction in ways that amuse and inspire. Linda Hall’s newest exhibition, “Eden Altered,” incorporates sculptures of the ivory-billed woodpecker, debatably extinct.

Another piece features a woman’s top half with threads hanging, as if thinking or crying about the extinction of the passenger pigeon she cradles in her hand. For Hall, these pieces summarize the beauty and sadness found in the natural world and her artistry.

“The idea is really thinking about the sadness of the wildlife and the natural spaces that we are losing,” Hall reflects. “Teaching at FSU, which I do occasionally as an adjunct. (Students) In their short 22-year lives, they have seen their South Florida homes and locations altered. The trees across the street are no longer there. It’s happening so quickly, and we are losing so much. So, the idea of Eden to me is a land that is no longer.”

Linda Hall’s connection with nature led her back to the canopy-covered streets of Tallahassee, where she currently makes art and teaches at Florida State University. A self-declared army brat, Hall’s childhood was transient and required a move every year and a half to different bases worldwide. By high school, Hall’s parents had divorced, and she found herself in Fort Walton Beach.

She moved around the southeast finding her way to FSU to receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art. Hall fell in love with the community, the trees, and Tallahassee’s combination of college town and Capital City. When it came time to graduate from North Carolina at Chapel Hill with her Master of Fine Arts, she rejected the expectations of an artist to move to New York City and beg for crumbs. Instead, she embraced Tallahassee’s artistic collective and her happiness.

Since then, Hall has created a unique, exuberant, artistic, and academic life where she makes art to fill galleries and creates lessons to fill young minds. Hall’s artistic practice engages with unusual materials with histories, such as quilts, hair, beads, and recycled materials that have become extinct, like the world their owners once knew.

With these materials and a paper mâché technique learned from her time with the Bread and Puppet Theater, she stunningly creates life-size animal forms, human limbs, wild flora and fauna, and masks that may leave the viewer confused yet intrigued.

Her intention in creating, even if admittedly subconscious, is to allow for questions. “What is that made of? It looks familiar. Do I have a history with that?” The goal is to keep them witnessing and experiencing the work for as long as possible.

Hall believes antiques, left empty after decades of decay, often hold memories passed down from loving hands that can be repurposed into what Hall calls “containers for the spirit.” The balance of humor and macabre creates a space for sadness to be dealt with collectively, almost ritualistically leading to a dialogue within oneself. It is in this emptiness that Hall finds moving.

“[One of my favorite works in the show] is a pair of shoes made from hair. I have a friend, Dean Newman, who has long silver fairytale hair, and it grows very fast, so he gives it to me,” Hall said. “I have a pair of women’s heels out of it, and they hang on the wall. I think that’s a really successful use of material that is kind of poetic in a way because it connects the head and the feet — creating shoes that can’t be worn… what do they hold if it’s not a person? It’s sort of holding emptiness. It’s just material that everyone has, and it’s free. So, it’s sort of mysterious and poignant.”

Linda Hall’s investigation of life, death, and all that fills the in-between has always infused her work. Her childhood bedroom served as her first private canvas. She painted mural after mural on her walls, depicting a depressing, teenage-angst, desolate landscape with her version of the last warrior being greeted by the great spirit above. As her artistry has grown, so has her reach.

Hall has confidently stepped from the private into the public, a strategic move bringing community connectedness to her art. Each of her shows begins with a public procession through the streets to make the private art in a public space connected to the shows.

“What I love about doing a procession is it deals with people …When you go into a gallery, you sort of have a mindset of what you are going to see. But when art is in public space, you don’t have that preconceived notion; you don’t have that closed mind,” says Hall. “I like that not everyone who understands art gets to see it. So, it opens a dialogue for the community to be involved.”

Hall views her role as an artist and educator to shine a light on areas where it is culturally shadowed, ask questions and create dialogue.

Through collaboration and curation, LeMoyne Arts’ Program Director, Powell Kreis, joined the worlds of Linda Hall and painter/sculptor Dimelza Broche in the show Eden Altered. Hall describes Broche as a wonderfully open person whom she immediately loved. Together they comment on nature’s joy and destruction in ways that weirdly overlap yet ultimately call for us all to return to and take back nature.

Read more on the Tallahassee Democrat.