THE LINE MARKER PRACTICE is an ongoing project to project conceptual process using the road, its line marker schematic and paint as a creative index.

Since 1996, I have developed a method and means that has been exampled in paintings, installations, performance, text works, time-based chronicles, public art and research-based interventions. Various projects have concentrated on colloquial nuances of specific geographies and their markings or conversely, addressed the line marker as a global omnipresent signifier. ‘Landscape’ as a construct and subject has been considered as city, country, rural, urban and the spaces in-between. Beginning in 2001, I concentrated on the heritage or historicity of the line marker, tracing its origins to Michigan, its inventor and the biographical meanings of this device at the cusp of industrial modernity in 1911. This lead to repeated research delves in Detroit and subsequent studio explorations surrounding notions of biography and narrative.

Painting as idea and as process concurrently developed as I produced works and exhibitions surrounding conceptual to pataphysical notions of: lines, marking, mapping, geographical shared latitudes, graffiti as a related language, the element of distance visually captured by thickness, the line marker as a device within pop culture and road marker words such as LANE, ONLY, SCHOOL etc. as lines shaped further with cross-cultural meanings.

All these processes have summed up an intent and been curatorially received over the twenty-seven years as: new treatises of landscape painting, explorations of open and or imposed meanings of coded regulated language, the city as image, narrations on labour, analog technology, notions of the everyday and painting’s ‘found object’.

I continue to work akin in spirit to that of the topographer, executing ideas like a contemporary journeyman avid for information. Creatively itinerant and multi-disciplined, the process of investigating a language that oscillates between representation and abstraction continues.

CW 2020