Millie Gleeson - Living Lines

‘Living Lines’ has manifested from a year-long conversation with the planet Mercury; the process is a call and response where I have intuitively followed the movement of energy through line and automatic drawing techniques. This is the first chapter in a twelve-year cycle where I intend to work with the planets through an annual profection technique, working with my timelord plant each year.

‘Living Lines’ is an immersive drawing installation featuring a sequence of life-sized ink drawings on tracing paper. The drawings are displayed both centrally on a free-standing dodecahedron consisting of 12 wooden frames as well as on the surrounding walls, creating a tunnel like effect for the drawings to be experienced. The translucent layers blur variations of bodies: figures, plants and silhouettes; merging patterns and shapes through mark making and montage, becoming one large-scale drawing.

A performance took place on the opening night, which consisted of one hour of live drawing; myself, the model and a plant where inside of the dodecahedron, where I drew the plant and moving model on the inner layer of the 12 stretched frames for the duration of an album. The audience had to work hard to find the emerging lines, journeying around the structure to catch glimpses of brush strokes, fleeting shadows and the tips of fingers. This mirrored the Mercurial nature, reflecting the fast-paced orbit which is hard to witness due to its proximity to the sun.

Once the performance had finished, the door to the dodecahedron was opened and the audience could journey into the next layer of the drawing labyrinth, making the drawings visible from the interior and exterior of the structure.