Like many other artists, I work in lines. So much so in fact, that my artistic practice seems to revolve around trying eagerly to become a line myself.

The line is a bendy concept that seems to lend itself to many a cultural function, from cardiograms, to graceful Da Vinci portraits of saintly faces, to cross-country road systems, lined paper notebooks and strings on an instrument.

“Lend itself”: I enjoy this inherent generosity of the line. It volunteers itself readily to bear meanings, to be used, to be deployed in all manner of shapes that matter. It offers itself up to culture to spin itself a cocoon out of intricate threads. As an artist, I spend a lot of time analysing the lines that connect images, music, symbols, cinematic moments, throughout history, wondering why certain marks on a drawing, simple gestures in a dance or specific sequences of words strung together make me feel quite so much, or even seem to impart a sense that I’ve learned something profound about the world.

This article examines a few ways in which the line manifests itself as cultural scaffolding capable of bearing complex associations. The images link to artworks that probe these qualities of the line. I then turn to a current art experiment that addresses this: a performative novel whose single living character is a “lethargic line”.

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