As I went upstairs for my initial responses to the exhibitions my attention was taken by lines.  Sometimes I hear my mind tell me that something so simple is wrong, there must be something deeper, that I must be a deeper person.  I ignored these thoughts and concentrated on the lines of wire beginning Faith’s work.  Parallel lines moving perfectly together going the same direction, working together toward the same end. A line must end, with the only exception being the circle – a line without a start or an end.  I thought about how the line and the meaning of the line can change dramatically by adding more lines or distorting the line.  I immediately thought of written language, of cave drawings of the ancient world, connection and communication.  I watch how the wire passes silently through a series of translucent blue brackets.  My mind is cast back to the conversation just had in the foyer about migratory birds and their journeys across the world with stops in various but specific places, then about bus stops and train stations, connecting people and places, and finally how we’d also spoken about how climate change is also changing the route of those birds and how our bus stops and train stations move with the evolution of a place or a change in the socio-economic climate.  Perhaps the translucency of the brackets speak of this; they’re here…for the moment.  The wires run across, up and down, across and then round.  My fascination lies most in what I think of as the ‘ending’ of the piece.  As the lines come together, brush one another briefly to make a turn across the floor before moving apart once again.  It speaks to me of those brief moments of connection which I think are rare, but also of the lack of connection and how one and the other are co-dependent.  They would not exist without the other.  This I would call absolute connection.  The fact it ends in the centre of the space makes me think about death but also possibility.  This piece could go anywhere at all, we’ve seen that from the course it’s already taken, you look around the room and can imagine it easily moving there.  But it doesn’t, it ends here and I think of a friend who died at age 24 and the luck to have had a brief moment of connection with them.  I scribble down some lines and move downstairs to the ‘Perches and Flyways’ exhibition. 

I immediately notice how line has been used to carve out beautiful visions of various birds known to this area using clay and mud like that of the coasts some call home for a while, how line is representing ruffled feathers, talons and beaks, predatory eyes.  I make a sketch of lines using a block of charcoal I’d found on a beach sometime before.