TOWARDS AN EXPERIMENTAL ECOLOGY OF LINE

~ an exhibition ~

It was my interest in writing that first started me thinking about how lines are made. The mark-made line links writing to drawing; the spoken line links sound to song. My interest in mark-making set me writing into every apple on a tree. My interest in the spoken line, led me back to the sounding, moving body. And on, to the relationship between bodies, to the line as performance instruction (score) and line as trace of performance, evidence of an event that has taken place.

My interest in this wobbly event of the line, how it is made and what its making conveys, led me to develop the intra-disciplinary, creative-critical enquiry that is: “TOWARDS AN EXPERIMENTAL ECOLOGY OF LINE”. Using Tim Ingold’s taxonomy of line as a backbone, this show explores different “species” of line - threads (3D line), traces (2D line), dots (the broken line) & invisible or imaginary lines - and how these different linear modes intra-act to form an experimental ecology of line.

The work on show here has been exclusively produced by participants from the 2024 course. Over a period of six months (Feb-July 2024), a cohort of 18 artists, thinkers, writers and makers, moved through a creative-critical consideration of threads, dots, traces, combining these to form weaves, transcriptions, and finally coming together as an experimental ecology of line. This work has been divided into four sections to reflect these explorations:

TRACE

THE THREAD & THE WEAVE

DOTS & BLOBS

TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF LINE

We cannot talk about the line without expanding our anthropic horizon to encompass the more-than-human. Most lines emerge beyond the horizon of the human self. One of the central concerns of this exhibition is how the line sits between species and across creative-critical domains. The line cannot be contained, theoretically or materially. Line, like energy, does not end, it merely transforms. It is in this spirit of transdisciplinary, interspecies emergence that this work has been made.

If you are an interdisciplinary artist interested in this way of working, or an artist of any discipline looking to expand into others, the 2025 TOWARDS AN EXPERIMENTAL ECOLOGY OF LINE course dates have been announced and the next cohort is being enrolled. Early bird offer closes 10th Dec. Full info here.

We hope you enjoy the show!

Camilla Nelson

Curator & Course Convenor

artists

SUSANNE EULES

NANCY HOLMES

NATALIE VESTIN

LINDA RUSSO

SARAH WESTCOTT

JENNIFER SPECTOR

PETRA KUPPERS

TESSA WAITE

TRACE

“Like threads, traces abound in the non-human world. They mostly result from the movement of animals, appearing as paths or tracks. The snail leaves an additive trace of slime, but animal tracks are usually reductive, caused by boring in wood or bark, imprinting in the soft surface of mud, sand or snow or, on harder ground, the wear and tear of many feet [...] The word writing originally referred to incisive trace-making of this kind. In Old English the term writing carried the specific meaning 'to incise runic letters in stone' (Howe 1992: 61)."

(Ingold, 2016: 44-46; my emphasis)

At the first point of contact between thread and surface a dot is created. If this contact is maintained, if the thread begins or continues to explore its relationship with surface, there forms a trace.

quabble

CAROL DALTON is a poet and therapist based in Kent, UK. Her work has been published online by Pamenar Press, Longbarrow Press and Datableedzine. She also has a piece in Litmus, the Lichen Edition.

totm oak (2024)

MARY NEWELL authored the poetry chapbooks TILT/ HOVER/ VEER (Codhill Press) and Re-SURGE (Trainwreck Press, now from the author), poems in numerous journals and anthologies, and essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal 38.3). Her poetry book, ENTWINE, is forthcoming from BlazeVox Press. She is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. Newell teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Connecticut, Stamford and intermittent online classes. Recording of a 2024 interview with the Brooklyn Rail.

DROUGHT transcribes the drought-diminished landscape in Alberta, Canada, during the summer 2024 through a series of fine art prints bearing an uncanny resemblance to satellite imagery. Each of the five artist books (plus one artist proof), contains ten unique collagraph prints mounted in an “explosion book” format with handmade paste paper. See an essay on the project at: https://artthatmakesadifference.ca/drought-a-set-of-artist-books/.

BETH SHEPHERD is an Ottawa-based artist working in printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, and text. Situated at the intersection of ecology, animal advocacy, and ecocritical art history, her multi-year art-research projects explore the non-human world and humanity’s impacts on it. https://artthatmakesadifference.ca

the collectors

CHRIS PARTRIDGE is a visual artist and poet with a background in science, outdoor education and human development.  Her creative practice is an on-going conversation with life, a dialogue about our  entangled relationship with the natural world, impermanence and time. Multiple narratives that are ecological, historical, culture and economic. http://cpartist.co.uk/

BOUNDARY LAYER - A SCORE

Set out for a walk

Allow your intuition to guide you

Find a place where you can lie down on the ground

Lie down

Stay there for as long as you want

Give yourself time

Notice the sensations in your body and in your environment and where your thoughts take you

When you are ready, get up and walk away

Based in Bannau Brychieniog, Mid Wales, TESSA WAITE has embarked on a daily act of lying down on the ground. “I often experience this as relief, to be literally grounded is to experience relief from my brain being at the top of my body. Once on the ground, body and brain are more equal. It opens me up to my imagination and what it means to be human and to connect in the broadest sense across a global surface to other lives who share it. In this way the practice I am developing focuses on a recognition of interconnectedness. This is in contrast to a pervasive sense of separateness and individualism, caused by the influence of capitalism and the dominance of technology. I use my being much like a tuning fork, translating these acts into images, words and live art performance. As a French horn player once said to me “it’s just air in and air out, with hopefully transformation on the way…”.

THE THREAD & THE WEAVE

“A thread is a filament of some kind, which may be entangled with other threads or suspended between points in three-dimensional space. At a relatively microscopic level threads have surfaces; however they are not drawn on surfaces.”    

(Ingold, 2016: 42)

UNFOLDING THE COSMOS IN THE SELF

UNFOLDING THE COSMOS IN THE SELF (2024) draws on Daoist philosophy to explore the interconnectedness of all things, impermanence, and the cosmic flow of Qi through cyanotype on Xuan paper. Shadows of hair form patterns reminiscent of the cosmic web. This piece moves between order and chaos, embodying the transient nature of existence. The delicate paper sways gently in the air, creating shifting light and shadows, echoing the Daoist concept of flow and transformation. It unfolds as a quiet reminder of how the universe and the self are deeply intertwined in a constant state of flux.

Dimensions: 7.3m x 0.68m, 8.5m x 0.68m, 8.5m x 0.68m

Medium: Cyanotype on Xuan paper

BOYA LIANG is an artist exploring existence, time, and the essence of being through the intersection of art, science, and philosophy. Rooted in her Chinese heritage and cultural nomadism, her work seeks to articulate life’s fluid nature and the invisible connections between individual existence and the cosmos.

in the woven

In the woven

​​​​ for Ken

tapestry of siblings, you asked,

you asked your body be dispersed

from the overlook of the glacial lake

where you loved to hike.

And so I find myself

on our last trip together

facing backward
on the train shuttling us forward

you next to me/not next to me

only the box with your cremains.

KAREN NEUBERG is the author of the full-length poetry collection, PURSUIT (Kelsay Press) and three chapbooks including “the elephants are asking” (Glass Lyre). Her poems and collages have appeared in numerous literary journals. She holds an MFA from the New School and is the associate editor of the poetry journal First Literary Review-East.

x/i:mport (the woven self)

x/i:mport (the woven self), 5 water colored paper stripes, 6,5 x 120 cm, calligraphy pen, 2024.

After 22 and 47 years, respectively, in the USA we moved to Germany two years ago, facing practical, mental, and emotional issues of preparing, leaving, letting go, arriving, building anew from scratch for the second time. Transcribing a list of short comments regarding questions of missing (yellow), not missing (grey), of wanting to (blue)/must do (red), awareness of doing the last time (green) into a paper sculpture, I realized how all details of our lives are entangled with each other, embedded in different countries at the same time due to relationships, citizenship status, and the exchanging our house for a rental apartment.

SUSANNE EULES is a German American transdisciplinary artist in the fields of experimental, visual, and sonic poetry, performance, and visual arts. Recipient of the German Award for Nature Writing 2023 for miami t:ex[i]ting, published by Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2025. nivolog was published by Contraband Modernist Poetry Press, UK in 2023.

THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST

Burning punishments

Yours or mine? I am not sure

Kintsugi atones

AMANDA BROWN is interested in the dialogue between object and language. Somewhere between the two is a seeming possibility of experience that lives within the conversations and brings it into new connectivities. She seeks the haptic resonance between hand and brain, the heartsong of that which is tacit commonality.

DOTS & BLOBS

“It is more usual to think of persons or organisms as blobs of one sort or another. Blobs have insides and outsides, divided at their surfaces. They can expand or contract, encroach and retrench. They take up space or - in the elaborate language of some philosophers - they enact a principle of territorialisation. They may bump into one another, aggregate together, even meld into larger blobs rather like drops of oil spilled on the surface of water.”(Ingold, 2015: 3)

“In fact, most if not all life-forms can be most economically described as specific combinations of blob and line, and it could be the combination of their respective properties that allow them to flourish. Blobs have volume, mass, density: they give us materials. Lines have none of these. What they have, which blobs do not, is torsion, flexion and vivacity. They give us life. Life began when lines began to emerge and to escape the monopoly of blobs.” (Ingold, 2015: 4)

dots

DOTS was started in Camilla's course "Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line."   It grew out of a prompt and was inspired by wonderful examples Camilla provided for us about various conceptual responses to "lines" which included dots and weaving.  "Dots" came out of an exercise of observing the environment for expressions of specks, spots, dots after having visited my three-year-old grandchild.  Children and dots seem to go together! 

NANCY HOLMES is a writer who has published six collections of poetry, most recently Arborophobia (U of Alberta Press, 2022). She taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia for many years.  She lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada.

os cordis

Os cordis is a visual essay that follows the path of blood through the human heart to consider a mysterious bone that exists in the hearts of some mammals.

NATALIE VESTIN (she/her) is a writer, artist, rosemaler, and infectious diseases researcher from Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. Her work has been published in Pleiades, The Normal School, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

water relations

My moss initiation occurred in the rainforest near the urban core of Vancouver, Canada over twenty years ago. I tucked my camera lens into the forest understory, wanting to shrink myself and be ancient amongst them. Mosses dotted the earth at our biotic origins. They gather and retain civility, in mutual relationality capturing, filtering, and dispersing water. As green beings who moved from water to land to satisfy a need over which we now fight (against profit, against loss), they speak to me of the future of human evolution. We are an extension of their earliest sunward gestures.

LINDA RUSSO is a poet, writer, and student of ecospheric care. Her most recent book is the verdant (Middle Creek Publishing). She co-edited Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan University Press). She teaches at Washington State University and directs EcoartsonthePalouse.com.

cress

I sowed cress seeds over a poem of mine printed on paper. The process of germination and shoots growing through the text, touching and redacting in some way, interested me; the voice of the poem being acted upon by further agential elements. In both the cress and the poem, something is woven and woven again, splitting and doubling into new, flawed form. 

SARAH WESTCOTT has published two collections with Pavilion Poetry - Slant Light, and Bloom which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Hellens Prize for best second collections in 2023. Her second pamphlet, Pond, a hybrid piece, was published in 2024. She is researching a PhD on the poem as a multi-species event.  https://sarahwestcott.co.uk/

SPAWN

This work-in-progress evolved from observing the development of frog spawn into tadpoles. I made daily notes and drawings of the developing spawn with the aim of letting their growth or agency guide the piece. Each body carried its own individual expressivity and together they formed a tentative propulsive energy or narrative. I transposed my drawings onto musical score, the lines echoing the meniscus of water and its permeable boundaries and spaces of exchange between human and tadpole. 

SARAH WESTCOTT has published two collections with Pavilion Poetry - Slant Light, and Bloom which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Hellens Prize for best second collections in 2023. Her second pamphlet, Pond, a hybrid piece, was published in 2024. She is researching a PhD on the poem as a multi-species event. https://sarahwestcott.co.uk/

AN ECOLOGY OF LINE

"As Samuel Johnson reminds us in his Dictionary, one of the meanings of the word [line] (the seventeenth and final entry in his list) is 'lint or flax'. Lint is derived from the Latin linea, which originally meant a thread made from flax, linum. These threads were woven into cloth that we now call linen, and that could be used to line garments by providing an extra layer of warmth. And if 'line' began as a thread rather than a trace, so did 'text' begin as a meshwork of interwoven threads rather than of inscribed traces. The verb 'to weave', in Latin, was texere, from which are derived our words 'textile' and - by way of the French tistre - 'tissue', meaning a delicately woven fabric composed of a myriad of interlaced threads." (Ingold - Lines, 2016: 63, italics in original)

Ecology is a word that designates the material and energetic relationship between living organisms. An ecology of line is an examination of the relationship between these different forms of line. It is not only a weave, a text, a tissue, an entanglement but a palimpsest. It is not only a weave, a tracery, a tissue, an entanglement and a palimpsest of line as material presence but as absence, as lack: a tunnel, punctured by cracks, creases, surface ruptures made by threads displacing other threads, or traces overlaying, displacing or erasing other traces. It is the pointed ends of lines like claws or beaks, needles or nails, breaching the inside from outside. It is elements like hair and teeth growing through the surface of skin, moving from inside to outside. It is the self-dissolving or self-dispersing lines, lines that break up into dots, like seeds or spores, moved by invisible currents of energy in air and water until they make contact with surface or soil and begin to extend threads in roots, make traces, become line-like again.

It is these linear movements that we have been considering & that we attempt to create, render or describe as an ecology of line.

chanson de toile

CHANSON DE TOILE (2024) emerged as an assemblage built through grief and loss of my father. Drawing from epistolary fragments, words and objects passed between us, I was interested in weaving a textual cloth, wove of memory, silence, ellipses and separation.

JENNIFER SPECTOR is a poet/writer from New York, long-based in Panama. She is the author of Hithe. Her recent chapter “Thacchen: The Dwelling Body in the Rough House” was published in Dwelling: Cultural Representations of Inhabited Spaces. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Shearsman, Reliquiae and 14 magazine.  www.jenniferspectorstudio.com

S/C/R/AW/L

S/C/R/AW/L – ink drawing/computer generated map rendering some details of sonic, graphic, visual, and linguistic approaches of my full poetry book with the same title, 2024

This map is drawn from my hybrid manuscript originating in the experience of my father’s admission to a hospice and my experiences of returning with a back injury to my birth country under lock-down conditions due to Covid-19, online teaching from the European continent while coping with the final farewell from my father. As my father’s body started to deteriorate, my own injured body gained back functionality and strength with the help of manual therapy and increasing lengths of walks. Walking while confronting my father’s dying process was a counterbalance and therapy for body, mind, and soul.

SUSANNE EULES is a German American transdisciplinary artist in the fields of experimental, visual, and sonic poetry, performance, and visual arts. Recipient of the German Award for Nature Writing 2023 for miami t:ex[i]ting, published by Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2025. nivolog was published by Contraband Modernist Poetry Press, UK in 2023.

À bout de souffle / Breathless

À bout de souffle / Breathless (2024) was shot with the breathing rock at the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France. It is a collaboration by Petra Kuppers and some shy worms. This video is part of a wider enquiry on diving into soil, traveling with trees, and engaging queer/crip plant aesthetics. Petra works on Planting Disabled Futures, a virtual reality/community performance project, as a Just Tech Fellow (2024-2026).

PETRA KUPPERS (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street (Wayne State University Press, 2024), investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil, bringing together life and death. Petra teaches at the University of Michigan and was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. www.petrakuppers.com  

plot 46: the unTerweLt

PLOT 46: THE UNTERWELT is a multi-year field project I am undertaking to learn about and practice regenerative vegan organic agriculture. Unterwelt of Plot 46 is a poem I wrote to embody being (in the) soil. To evoke a sense of “soilness” without trying to be representative, I integrated five experimental prints and a spoken poem a two-minute video.

BETH SHEPHERD is an Ottawa-based artist working in printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, and text. Situated at the intersection of ecology, animal advocacy, and ecocritical art history, her multi-year art-research projects explore the non-human world and humanity’s impacts on it. https://artthatmakesadifference.ca

fireline

FIRELINE (2024) is an artist's book that uses archival materials, collage, and text to explore the continuing effects of the1918 Cloquet Fire on the landscape and people of northeastern Minnesota.

NATALIE VESTIN (she/her) is a writer, artist, rosemaler, and infectious diseases researcher from Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. Her work has been published in Pleiades, The Normal School, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

BLINKING FISH DOES NOT DAYDREAM WHEN SWIMMING

Blinking Fish Does Not Daydream When Swimming is a video poetry piece that reflects on the fleeting nature of life and our connection to the world around us. Inspired by a dream of becoming a goldfish flowing in the air, the video weaves together images of rivers, oceans, and skies, evoking thoughts of origins, journeys, and the unknown future. Words flow like water, capturing moments of transformation, memory, and the pulse of existence. The poem carries a gentle yet elusive presence, inviting a reflection on the fluidity of our journey and the unseen currents that connect us. It brings forth a sense of drifting through a dream-like state while still being anchored in reality, embodying the shared experiences and transient moments that shape existence.

BOYA LIANG is an artist exploring existence, time, and the essence of being through the intersection of art, science, and philosophy. Rooted in her Chinese heritage and cultural nomadism, her work seeks to articulate life’s fluid nature and the invisible connections between individual existence and the cosmos.

Un title(d)

CHRIS PARTRIDGE is a visual artist and poet with a background in science, outdoor education and human development. Her creative practice is an on-going conversation with life, a dialogue about our entangled relationship with the natural world, impermanence and time. Multiple narratives that are ecological, historical, culture and economic. http://cpartist.co.uk/

REFERENCES

Ingold, T. (2016) Lines: A Brief History. Oxford & New York: Routledge. Second edition.

Ingold, T. (2015) The Life of Lines. Oxford & New York: Routledge. First Edition.