NMMU: Could you tell us a bit about the works you’re showing at the exhibition in the Josip Račić Gallery?
Letricija Linardić: The series on show titled The Present Ones, consists of ten photographs, each measuring 100 x 100 cm. My exploration of photography, and portrait photography in particular, led me to a Victorian phenomenon known as “hidden mothers”, in which photographers concealed mothers beneath fabric so that children could be captured sitting still. What was once standard practice now seems quite peculiar, and it is this strangeness that I have carried into a contemporary context. I have borrowed the same method of portrait photography, but loaded it with an entirely different symbolic meaning. Once I had conceived the work, settled on all the details, and made the various artistic decisions, for example, which fabrics to use, how to arrange them, and so on, the photographs themselves were made in collaboration with fellow photographer Ivan Vranjić, whose expertise and skill proved a perfect match for the concept and my vision, with the images shot in studio conditions. The portraits depict hidden mothers, women who are longstanding close friends or colleagues, people with whom I share both a common history and present-day moments, together with their children. The personal bond between us was something I felt was essential to the work.

NMMU: What is the meaning behind the title of the exhibition, The Present Ones?
Letricija Linardić: The work was originally called The Invisible Ones, but that never felt quite right for the concept. It was only once the photographs had reached their final form that the title The Present Ones came about. The work addresses the physical and emotional presence of mothers in their children’s lives, whose sacrifices, love, desires and feelings are so often invisible to the outside world. It is merely the outlines of their bodies beneath the fabric that signal their existence. What strikes me when looking at historical photographs of hidden mothers covered in cloth is how remarkably they mirror society’s relationship with mothers and women today, their unseen labour, their needs and ambitions, so frequently rendered invisible. Contemporary society exploits the visual presence of women’s bodies in the media and on billboards, yet they remain purely decorative – not unlike those figures from the previous century, shrouded in fabric and absorbed into the background. This bizarre treatment of the female body is something the historical and contemporary photographic contexts share in equal measure.
Women’s visibility is, however, a matter of convenience. When society needs something from them, a vote cast, a family tended to, they are suddenly very much present. Once that need has been met, their social role is considered expendable, and they fade from view once again.

NMMU: The rich, heavy fabrics, those luscious brocades that feel almost tangibly real, play a significant part in the works. Are they simply decorative, or do they take on the role as protagonists in their own right? Might they call to mind bygone eras, places, events… perhaps even secrets…?
Letricija Linardić: The lavishness of the fabrics and textures, combined with an intense, powerful use of colour and deep contrasts, is meant to reflect the layered complexity and richness of the emotional ties between mother and child. Driven by a desire to freeze a moment in time and draw out each child’s individual character, much as great portraits of the past once did, I turned to history for guidance and found my answer in the work of Flemish painters. When I described the idea to Ivan, the bold colouring and contrast, the subdued light source, he arrived the very next day with a frame stretched with white canvas, which became our “Flemish window”: a single light source with a reflector positioned behind it. Every photograph was taken using that one light source alone. Viewed together, with their richly folded fabrics, muted light and sumptuous colour, the photographs carry the feel of “real” painted historical portraits, and it is this that lends them their iconographic power.

NMMU: What was it that drew you to printmaking?
Letricija Linardić: When I began my studies, I was utterly convinced I was going to be a painter. That notion didn’t last long, and soon enough I was captivated by the idea of sculpture. But by the time I finished, I had fallen in love with printmaking: the delicacy of paper, the sheer range of techniques, the particular textures and the hands-on, tactile pleasure of making the matrix. I had quite an extraordinary teacher in Josip Butković, a restless, driven printmaker who had an uncommon gift for passing his passion for printmaking and art on to his students. Now that I teach printmaking myself, I frequently catch myself reaching for something he once said, and I share it with my students, along with the conviction that it matters enormously to love what you do and to live it fully, from the first spark of an idea, through the whole process of making, to the finished work.

NMMU: What themes do you find yourself returning to in your work?
Letricija Linardić: Printmaking is my primary medium, and I am continually exploring the different forms it can take. Alongside more traditional printmaking practice, I regularly draw on photography, installation, artistic action, collaborative projects and artists’ books, to name but a few. My work addresses themes relating to formal artistic concerns, the use of contemporary technologies in dialogue with traditionally defined art forms, and I examine broader social and moral concerns through socially engaged works. I wouldn’t say I am bound to any single preoccupation, nor have I settled on one medium as my definitive voice. Being someone who thrives on learning and discovery, I have no allegiance to either traditional or contemporary technologies, the artistic idea I want to realise is what determines the medium. From there, I embark on what I can only call an artistic adventure, at times with an uncertain destination, opening myself up to whatever shifts along the way and drawing from them until I reach the final result. There are times, as with this particular work, when I have a sharp and concrete vision of exactly what I want from the start.

NMMU: What is your relationship with photography?
Letricija Linardić: I love photography. I adore it, in fact. But not indiscriminately, and not all of it. What draws me to an image is the sense of the artist’s idea behind it, some unexpected shift in perspective, or the sheer beauty of captured light. In today’s world, with its bewildering and seemingly pointless volume of images and the additional output generated by artificial intelligence, it will be interesting to see how photography, and visual art as a whole, manages to hold its ground and what purpose it will serve in society.

NMMU: How do you feel about the use of artificial intelligence in art?
Letricija Linardić: I find myself both drawn to it and wary of it at the same time. I was formed within a solid artistic tradition, grew out of it, and then began finding my own way through art and across different media. Against that backdrop, I watch with curiosity how things have shifted amongst young people today. Each new generation is different from the last, in the way they communicate, in how they understand the social purpose of art, and in their attitudes towards artificial intelligence. On the one hand, artificial intelligence can be a real asset to artists who are already established and wish to push into new territory. The same cannot be said, however, for those who are young and have yet to develop a solid grounding in knowledge, skill and experience in nurturing their own ideas. My concern is that by relying on artificial intelligence, they run the risk of losing their own identity before they have even had the opportunity to build one. Once that sense of personal identity and self-awareness is gone, the art that depends on it disappears along with it. Time will tell what the coming years will bring.
On the matter of technology and my thoughts around its use, I would like to mention two people in particular. The artist and professor Marijan Vejvoda was someone who made us acutely aware of a great many social dynamics, among them technology and the thoughtless ways in which it is used. He drew our attention to the fact that it is we who bend ourselves to technology rather than the reverse, and steered us towards a critical view of collectivism and the erosion of individuality, of the centralisation that inevitably follows, and of the way we are, in doing so, fashioning a society that is sliding towards tyranny by way of technology. The other person whose words I find myself quoting often is the musician Antonije Pušić, known as Rambo Amadeus, who brought primitivism and contemporary technology into dialogue with one another, a collision that produces turbo-folk, and in doing so threw into sharp relief the unintelligent, uncritical and careless use of technology in the making of kitsch. I put this passage through artificial intelligence, which tidied up my grammar, smoothed out my linguistic expression, recontextualised my thoughts and offered up alternative ways of putting things. It comes down to a question of consent. This time, I did not consent.

NMMU: What did your doctoral research focus on?
Letricija Linardić: Printmaking 😊. And education. Alongside my practice, I am deeply involved in art education. In my doctorate, I looked at printmaking in primary schools, examining its educational value through the lens of pupils’ psychomotor, emotional, aesthetic and cognitive development. Visual art has been cut down to a single hour a week in primary schools, yet it remains one of the few subjects in which every pupil realises their own ideas individually, working across a range of processes and developing as a rounded person in the process. Printmaking, as a technically demanding discipline, is increasingly being passed over simply because there is not enough time. The overarching goal of the doctoral research was to devise guidelines built around simpler, more contemporary printmaking techniques, in the hope of encouraging teachers to bring printmaking back into their classrooms. Every artistic discipline (drawing, painting, sculpture) when put to work on a meaningful artistic task, shapes pupils’ development in its own particular way. Printmaking, for its part, fosters psychomotor skills, abstract thinking, and the ability to anticipate and sequence the steps involved in producing a finished print. Its disappearance from the curriculum, together with that of other technically demanding artistic processes, within an already drastically hollowed-out primary school timetable, feeds a growing shallowness in how children work and an increasing clumsiness with their hands, underdeveloped fine motor skills, a stunted capacity to conceive and develop their own ideas… none of which, needless to say, bodes well. The growing insistence on educating young people purely for the labour market, and the erosion of arts education in schools that comes with it, is something I cannot get behind. I firmly believe that every young person should above all be supported in developing their own talents, abilities and knowledge, qualities that ultimately find expression in self-aware individuals with rewarding professional lives.

NMMU: How do you combine printmaking with other media and with fellow artists in collaborative works? What has been your greatest challenge? And your most significant collaboration?
Letricija Linardić: Printmaking is widely regarded as a medium bound by a great many rules and long-standing traditions. Once I had mastered all of that, I quickly went my own way and began using elements of printmaking techniques differently, experimenting with processes, weaving elements of industrial printing into my practice, employing text as a carrier of ideas, reversing its orientation, printing directly from my own body, bringing in complex technology and mind-control of machines …. in my work, I often play with printmaking as an art form, juxtaposing traditional and contemporary techniques, printed matter and books. I also incorporate performance and artistic action as part of the process of creating the matrix, while regarding the print presented to the public as a document of the previously executed procedures, performances, and actions. Every artistic project I take on, whatever the medium, is a challenge I embrace wholeheartedly. But not everything can be done alone, and so I often work alongside other artists, learning from them as much as they might learn from me, or I collaborate with a community, or with friends. I frequently collaborate with friends and fellow printmakers Tanja Dabo and Maja Rožman. Together we work as Collective 110-502, promoting art through exhibitions, lectures and artistic walks with the community. After these events, which typically last a few days, we are left with a real sense of having done something worthwhile for society. In The Present Ones, my collaborators are friends and colleagues and their children. Working with non-artists calls for a particular kind of flexibility, an openness to every personality, and a willingness to set out clearly the concept of participation and all the artistic and personal reasoning behind it. For this work, I invited the mothers to bring along objects that spoke to their identity, should they wish to, given that they themselves would be concealed and unseen. None of them knew what the others had brought, and none of them saw the photographs until the project was complete. Yet it turned out that some of the mothers had chosen to connect both themselves and their child to an object that had belonged to their own mother or grandmother, giving the photographs a historical resonance, a sense of family continuity and of the meaning certain objects carry across a lifetime. Many wanted bare feet, which I read as a form of intimacy; some came with music albums, favourite books or art objects; those with small children brought their toys, and all of this became their own contribution to the work. It was only once I saw how the children were dressed and what had been brought to the set that I set about composing each image, building outwards from there with the fabrics and colours.

NMMU: How do you see the role of art in building a “new world”? Where does its power reside?
Letricija Linardić: Having spent 27 years teaching art and working with students, I have observed that for some, art is a path to self-knowledge; for others, it is a form of therapy; some are drawn to provocation, criticism, questioning and enquiry, yet what unites them all is the act of creation, and once they discover it, they find in it an inexhaustible source of joy that nudges them towards genuine, positive change. That is art’s essential role. That is where its magic and its power lie. I believe our society could find healing and transformation through the application of artistic methods in education. And yet, watching the events playing out around us and the figures who have floated up from murky depths, now drifting above us like hollow scraps of wood on the surface of the water, I find it hard to see who will bring about change, or how, or when, or indeed where new technology is taking us in the construction of this (brave) new world.

Interviewed and compiled by: Lana Šetka, National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić (opening and installation) Ivan Vranjić photographs of works by Letricija Linardić from the series The Present Ones, 2024