Everything in this exhibition shouts line and order at me.
Even though the ribbons are a mass of soft colour, it is made of 6,000 vertical lines. Prompted by listening to Jacob I began thinking about this and realised how many of the things that surround us are structured into lines and symmetries. From crosswords to architecture, from woven textiles to computer screen pixels.
Then I started to think about what crept in between – the snakes on the snakes and ladders boards, the wild tendrils growing round a garden trellis, the people living in a city grid system like Manhattan, the buddleia growing from the brick walls of buildings.
That’s what led me to this workshop – I wanted to do a session just looking at how lines work – singular lines dividing a page, or a mass close together like the ribbons to create a volume. And then what if we add in some random not obviously linear objects and work the two together to explore what happens and how individual perspectives and experiences show themselves through the drawing.
We spent four hours on line; making a line dictionary from the gallery, then drawing and redrawing from the collected line characters. Always questioning what line is – as an object, as delineation, as structure. We explored the nature of 2 and 3 dimensional line drawing, drawing the line and then cutting it out to build another drawing, playing with it as a structural object. The focus was absolute the evolution of work was far reaching.
This workshop spanned Jacob Dahlgren’s obsession with stripes, grids and multiples while leaning forward with anticipation towards Monika Grzymala’s exhibition here in the summer which I’m really looking forward to.
From a Dot 