A line is both economical and flexible. At its most basic, it gestures to movement, or delineates the edge of a form. Yet a recent accounting for the line’s expanded history, and by extension, an expanded history of drawing, acknowledges the wriggling of the line off the picture plane and into physical space*. In Crabtree and Evans’ Gulch (2016) organic lines become animated through a nod to organic matter; less a marker of movement than a stand-in for bodies themselves. Small multi-hued sculptures made from sausage casing and jesmonite are both intestine and sausage-like; steel rods are coated in a lumpy paper pulp that belies a durable core. These are lines with interiors and exteriors, lines with life.

Gulch (2016) also considers one of the preeminent lines in the human psyche – that of the literal and metaphorical horizon. In an inversion of ground and air, a carpet large enough to nearly fill the gallery has been printed with an image of swirling multi- coloured smoke. Tubular fabric sculptures curl and bend just underneath, forming impromptu hills and valleys in its otherwise flat surface. These bulging, flesh like sculptural forms provide an exposed interior to an almost topological scene, as if the horizon is a space that is difficult to crawl out of, but easy to slip in.

Text by Jacqueline Bell

*Curated by Connie Butler and Catherine De Zegher, the MoMA exhibition, “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century” (2010-2011) maintained this thesis. www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/online/