Lines Made by Walking

Slide projection sequence, 2003
Looped sequence of 35mm photographic transparencies, projected with 2 second interval at size 175 x 263 cm.
 

This is a projected slide piece consisting of a series of photographic transparencies, as documentation of a performance by the artist.

The viewer sees Carey Young, dressed in a suit, walking backwards and forwards in a crowd of commuters. The figure of the artist appears and disappears amongst the others surrounding her, who appear similar to her. This action is repeated this until we realize that her repeated walking appears, in fact, to be ‘inscribing’ a line in the crowd. The artist appears to be restaging works by the Situationists as much as by Richard Long, particularly his work ‘A Line Made by Walking’, much as her activity can also be read as that of a the clockwork toy or caged animal pacing in captivity. She appears as if displaced, or within a different temporal continuum: the artist appears to be repeating the workers’ daily journey but at a faster speed. Her struggles to create a space within the crowd could be seen as a deadpan parallel for artistic‘struggle’. The artwork appears balanced between two states, as confined as the daily monotony of the commuters’ journey and as some kind of free act hidden within monotony, but equally within its own modes of institutionalization.

As a projected slide piece, the rhythm of the slides changing automatically within the projector (at a 2 second interval) adds a sense of inevitability and a machinic rhythm to the work, plus a cyclical form to the piece.