Linda Ekstrom, prominent working artist, teacher, and lecturer in the College of Creative Studies at UCSB will be sharing her thoughts on the word related to body, space and memory as part of the City College Fine Arts Lecture Series.

Ekstrom’s lecture will be held 4:30 p.m. Dec. 1 in the Humanities Building–Room 111.

Currently exhibiting at the Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica, Ekstrom’s work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Art in America and other publications.

She received her bachelor’s from UCSB in 1982 followed by her master’s in 1996.

Ekstrom’s work focuses primarily on words and how they relate to other parts of the human experience.

Her work includes book arts, multimedia pieces and installations, which often use the Bible as a key medium of choice.

“I have thought of my altered Bibles as a visual way of looking at the activity of deconstructing text in search of meaning,” Ekstrom said. “My altered Bibles insist that interpretation must remain open. They serve as visual symbols against fundamentalism, defying a singular, literal read by rearranging the order into myriad possibilities.”

In her work she often accompanies an altered book with found objects. Ekstrom creates an array of pieces with items such as glass jars and pieces of wood, or butterfly wings and sewing thread.

“It is my ever present desire to construct meaning out of the common and domestic forms that abound in my world and to insert my practice into larger currents of religious thought, history and ritual expressions which define life, lived-out within the cosmos,” she said.

In her gallery “Memory Reliquaries,” she uses everyday objects such as children’s shoes and flowers.

“These [objects] now stand in for the lives and histories of anonymous people, their places, their events and their individual memories,” Ekstrom said.

In her lecture she will continue to explore some of these ideas.

“Like religion, art can give back to us the situations of our dreams and the memories of our experiences that are physically inscribed in us by enabling us to locate those places of mystery and the sacred,” she said.