Line-Making: Alchemical Drawing Methodologies
A silvered dividing bar lies at the cusp of Auckland's Fort Lane. The original shoreline is drawn out: the line separating a natural and reclaimed stratum. A line becomes a threshold. Former Point Britomart is disseminated underfoot - a result of the 1860 reclamations.
Matter is never still. Consider silver, an element created from the explosion of a star: molecular alchemy resulting in precious metal and human existence. This work ties a mountain and a star together in their exploded fate. Collision and force are explicit - as seen through metal forging. How can a process led practise incorporate drawing methodologies to extract literal and conceptual lines from Salt and Silver to reveal historical narratives on Auckland City’s original shoreline, and connect geology to divine alchemy? This question focused my research, which aims to redefine drawing methods limited to pencil on paper, expanding it to a spatial breadth. The form of a line is this work's muse.
Throughout Fort Lane on Auckland's reclaimed foreshore, Tide Line installations reside underfoot. They are leading gestures formed between pavers. The question is, leading to or from where? Up close, what forms the lines are silver and salt cast memorial stones. The materials suggest a flux between permanence and impermanence, surrendering to weather, chance and circumstance. Salt evaporated from Waitematā Harbour gestures to the reclaimed shoreline, washing away in rain and crystallising elsewhere in a new self. In addition, a silver Plumb Line is reflected in a puddle of rainwater.
Each line gives evidence to an unfixed volcanic topology we inhabit, constructed from the exploded Point Britomart. Viewers can trace lines to ground level or a central drain where they slip away. The line interventions are an invitation to attend to the small, unseen and infrathin, in a geology that is no longer looked at or can no longer be seen.
'The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home' - Annie Dillard (1974).
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Materials Silver, salt, clay, rainwater
