Sue Gallagher, 1000 line-dwelling, 2020

The Line-dwelling drawing series explores dwelling as a network of ornamental lines and oneiric thresholds which draw out a different self-relation to dwelling. The project renegotiates a shifting geography of gender beyond the heteronormative patterning of home and body. Pursued here are the embodied implications of dwelling. But what of the lines of a home-body? What is the complex of lines that makes up everyday life, between a body and a building? From the drawing inquiry into embodied dwelling has emerged an extension of bodily matter and forces outward and into the environment. Wandering lines, which appear and disappear, and contribute to a queer imaginary of dwelling.  

The familiar architectural scales 1:1, 1:10, 1:100 and 1:1000 progressively shift emphasis in design documentation from detail, to interior layout, to building, to city—connecting and proportioning a standardisation of the body in relation to the built environment and beyond. The Line-dwelling series follows a similar numerological pattern—1, 10, 100, 1000—reworking a sequence of architectural scales as a quantity of lines. Lines of drawn and bodily matter are crafted into a series of dwelling structures that amplify the animating affect of ornamentation at a range of bodily and interior scales—wrist, head, floor and room. 

The culminating work 1000 line-dwelling explores embodied time as a drawing process in which the silvering of hair slowly renders me both transparent and metallic. Unpigmented hair appears silver when it reflects light. The fall of my unpigmented hairs have littered my clothes and home. This drawn ornamental structure-event of barely visible lines falling through ‘space’ and surfacing my dwelling place became the material basis for 1000 line-dwelling.­ The work offers an alternate mode of productivity and world-making through a network of fragile lines with the potential to fail. The crafting of lines of silver chain and fallen silver hair into ornamental body-building structures has enabled a relay of bodily lines and city-grid building lines.

This exhibition was developed in conjunction with practice-led PhD research at Auckland University of Technology.

Sue Gallagher, 1000 line-dwelling, 2020

Sue Gallagher, 1000 line-dwelling, 2020

Sue Gallagher, 1000 line-dwelling, 2020

Sue Gallagher, Urbis Porta Itinerant, 2020