‘Inside stretchy lines’ (2017)

From 2016, I used elastic lines as additions to the landscape of the Peak District.
Such ways of working had been part of aiming to find embodied ways of engaging with outdoor environments that were new to me. During that time, I also used running to explore the outdoor world - creating an embodied experience of the landscape through the felt dynamic that the processes of running - physical strain, attention to ground and wider environment, duration of time spent - brought to my body. The running actions facilitated a particular experience and view of the landscape. Using string outdoors seemed to be a process similar to running - just slower - and using lines in addition to this.
Using string outdoors was also a natural continuation of a previous artmaking phase in which I had used yarn to make hand-stitched drawings onto transparent fabric, and thus scribing a path of linework on a textile surface that would then become a wall-hung picture. Bringing string to the outdoor world seemed to expand this particular way of working - as my whole body became part of the dynamic string-work on the outdoor surface rather than on textile fabrics indoors. String or visual line in the outdoor world can emphasise certain areas and it can divide the environment into segments. Picking the string up and changing the structure of the lines by moving around in it brings an additional temporal dimension to such outdoor lineworks. It also introduces the theme of human action as a facilitator and the human body as a site where the experience of such actions happen. The photographs of the moving body in strings might suggest to the viewer to ponder what it might feel like to experience the landscape in this kind of way. It also raises questions - in a metaphorical sense - about the interdependencies between humans and the outdoor world.