Line- Used to separate space, used to define space, used to connect space.
As a practicing artist, I have not been able to commit myself to one medium, one way of expression. I have wondered for some time if it is because I have not found MY voice in MY work. One thing that has been continuous in my work is line. Well, I suppose all artists use line. So maybe that is a redundant statement.
While talking with my daughter recently, I recalled work I did in high school. I was taking a calculus course, enamored by the idea that every line in space has a defined role, an equation. I began to combine equations into visual articulations. I omitted the equations from the visual, so to anyone else they simply looked like more organic versions of Mondrian descent. This work reemerged much later in college as I majored in Art and Math. The lines merged with equations, and the physical.
In all my work, installations, sculptural, and 2d line is relevant and for me necessary. In an effort to continue to find my definition in what I create I pause here to identify why... I recently read "The Lonely City" by Olivia Laing. I came to a certain connection that has brought me some clarity. Line is connection.
Laing discusses the work of Dr. Donald Winnicott. Winnicott worked with evacuee children and studied the effects of attachment and separation. He had a therapeutic tool called the squiggle... simple lines of the unconscious to communicate underlying psychological issues. The interesting thing is his encounter with a 7-year-old boy, obsessed with string. He would tie it end to end, join things and people. Winnicott asserted this was a manifestation of the boy's issues with separation, due to his mother's absence at multiple points in his early life.
Laing also makes reference to the contemporary work of Zoe Leonard "Strange Fruit" where fruit peels are sutured together as if to hold on to the memory of the many in the art world lost to AIDS. The string acts as the lines of communication to not communicate a history but also to mend the remnants of what is the memory, to make a connection to history and hope for the future.
And then there was Henry Darger a collector of many things and an infamous (?) outside artist. But something he could not manage to collect was human connection. Endless journal entries are written about time spent untangling balls of twine, perhaps representing his need to untangle the lines of human connection.
So, perhaps, that is my need. To understand, create, manifest, repair connection. To work past my fears of separation and abandonment. To provide order to loss. To make passage for repair. Perhaps that is why line, a version of string, continues to be a reoccurring theme in my work.
Winnicott thought art could help repair, moving freely between integration and disintegration. The work of grief and mending preparing for the dangerous and lovely business of intimacy, and addressing the accrued damage of connection. I have come to believe the work that is most natural to me is, in fact, an attempt to make peace with my own inner demons and history.