Linda Knight is an artist and academic living and working on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri-willam, the Woi-wurrung language group of the Kulin Nation, Melbourne, Australia. Her drawing and textile-based practices are grounded in personal identity and history.
Born in the UK to English and Welsh parents, Knight migrated to Australia in 2000. Knight’s heritage and background inform her work, which explores experimental cartographies. Her drawings and textile works use animals, social media videos, domestic utilitarian textiles, and cartographic imagery, overlayering realism with gestural mark-making, Mercator map schema with traditional patchworking designs, and sashiko-inspired stitching to create new narratives from blended masculine and feminine modes of recording.
Knight’s critical and speculative approach to the hand-rendered is shaped by an awareness of the legacies and privileges of living and working on unceded Aboriginal land. Her work reflects on the complexities of place-making and the importance of reparative practice. Themes of being in and relating to the environment, and of telling stories that expand on dominant histories of places and lives, are central to her practice. Descending from a long line of deeply impoverished yet highly skilled craftswomen, Knight is inspired to practice the textile skills passed down to her, weaving into this the practices embedded in Australian culture and how these offer vivid records of times and places in the personal settings of domestic interiors.
A graduate of the University of Wolverhampton, UK (1999), and one of the first wave of Commonwealth-funded art practice PhDs in the UK, Knight has developed an international practice as an artist and Professor in art practice. Notable examples include Mapping Extinction II (2023-24) at Tartu Art House, Estonia, as part of the 2024 European Festival of Culture, and Chaosgraph: Scales of Infection (2022), a collaboration with New Zealand artist alys longley, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile. In 2025, she was a juried finalist in the Perry Drawing Prize at Adelaide Perry Gallery. In 2023, she was a juried finalist in the International Art Textile Biennale, touring Australia until 2025. In 2023, two drawings from her work Mapping Extinction I (2021) were selected and shortlisted for the Creative Climate Awards at TECO and projected onto the Manhattan Bridge in New York.
Social and site-based work is important to Knight’s practice. Alongside Finnish artists and environmentalists, she developed the Meiän Mettä Citizen Cartography Residency (2024), a major project funded by the Aaltonen Foundation and Metsähallitus Forststyrelsen, using experimental and gestural drawing practices to map the Sanginjoki forest in Finland. Knight’s exhibitions and site-based works function as cultural commentary and public pedagogy.
Linda Knight 