Lines & Liminality

All Lines Converge takes its title from a 1973 poem by Joanna Margaret Paul, which refers to all lines meeting at a centre outside the frame. Curated by Sophie O’Brien and Chloe Cull, this extensive show is primarily about that: connections and crossings between disparate ideas, media and artists―outside the frame of the monologue. The centre in Paul’s poem, is, in this exhibition, each of us: a centre that moves, creates and re-creates connections.

All Lines Converge is a show on being present, not somewhere else, not some utopian must, not some nostalgic collection, and not some message to mould us. In Paul’s poem, ‘all lines converge’ implies a centre but, by being outside the frame, this phrase becomes a reference to the subjectivity of perception. In the exhibition this text reads as a statement of faith that all these lines (the ways of reading these artworks) create meaningful experiences without a need for mediation or justification. This is not a show purely drawn from the gallery’s collection, but a curatorial exploration of the Govett-Brewster’s role in female art production to the present.

Upon entering you see (1974/2016) by Luise Fong, a Plasticine white-on-white minimalist relief, approximately 1 x 2 metres, coated. Its glass tank of water below a precarious diving board comes across as a hyper-technical object (or post-object). Hard sharp contours, opaque water and a sense of risk―how strong is that glass? What would happen if someone did climb those steps? Like an iceberg, this work hides more than it reveals and its existence depends on the tensions of opposing forces: buoyancy and gravity.