Lines of Action

How have artists used the 'line', in the most expanded sense of the term, as part of their creative process? Drawing and the idea of a 'line' as an organising principle in artworks isn't simply a matter of how artists use preparatory sketches. It is how artists deploy these lines to provide a sense of structure, or to create a 'score' for a more permanent rendition, or as a record of action, or to open up a space for memory.

Artists' 'lines' shape and consolidate time, thought and space within artworks irrespective of media - whether this be photography, painting, collage, printmaking, film or sculpture. This new exhibition at the Hatton Gallery brings together new and previously unseen works by artists associated with Newcastle University, with those who are 'alumni' of the national commissioning agency for moving-image artists, Film and Video Umbrella, such as Georgina Starr and Newcastle University Fine Art Professors Jane and Louise Wilson.

Showing for the first time in Newcastle is Jane and Louise Wilson's acclaimed video installation Undead Sun (2014), a work that brings further resonance to the exhibition title. Contrasting the surveillance and subterfuge manoeuvres of World War One military tactics with the frontline fate of soldiers called into action, it offers a haunting reminder of how outline plans can have unexpected outcomes and long-lasting effects.

As a counterpoint, Georgina Starr's film Quarantaine (2020), with its focus on the qualities of 'deep listening', its ideas of alternative pedagogies and its avowedly female main character energy, sketches a disarmingly surreal parallel universe whose atmosphere of mystery and affinity acts as an uplifting antidote to the turbulence and violence of war.

Other artists exhibiting include: Rita Donagh, Wolfgang Weileder and many others.