AN ECOLOGY OF LINE

2026

This exhibition showcases the work of the Foundation & Advanced Ecology of Line artists of 2026. I’ve been cultivating an Experimental Ecology of Line for three years now. The foundation course has had four cohorts and the advanced class has had two. If you’re new to this work, the 2024 & 2025 showcases give a good idea of what previous years’ participants have produced. Every artist makes from their uniquely embodied, environmentally-embedded and socio-culturally informed perspective, and every year the resulting work sheds new light on what an ecology of line might be. It is a continually evolving enquiry and one I feel privileged to facilitate.

Informed by Tim Ingold’s provisional taxonomy of line, the foundation course explores threads (3D, self-supporting lines), traces (2D lines, reliant upon surface), dots & blobs (the falling apart & aggregation of lines), invisible & imaginary lines, and the intersection of all of these. Advanced courses extend and complexify these categories into scores / narrative lines / heart lines / waves & flows / correspondence / boundary lines etc. To date, our showcase normally aggregates around the foundational categories of line, with some expansion. This year is different.

A six month course is a serious chunk of time to be thinking and making together. There are births, deaths, break-ups, marriages, political and environmental upheavals. Huge life events entwine with the creative questions we explore and this reflects in the particular flavour of work submitted each year. This year what has emerged is a repeated concern with breaking and repair. A creative-critical enquiry into ecologies of line might appear abstract in the face of major personal or global events, but a study of lines is a study of connection. An ecology of line is a perceptual enquiry into linear transformation and as such, it is a study of the treatment, behaviour and material or energetic constitution of connection. Some stages of human history accelerate the breaking over the making of these connections. This necessitates a corresponding surge in repair. The 2026 Ecology of Line showcase suggests that time is now. If you too are interested in the creative study of connection, the 2027 foundation & advanced courses are now open.

A full curator’s essay follows the showcase. Please read more in due course, but now, to the making…

We hope you enjoy the show!

Camilla A Nelson

Curator & Convenor

NEW: ECOLOGY OF LINE 2027

FOUNDATION & ADVANCED COURSES

- NOW BOOKING -

artists

Anna Torres Mallma Anna Masters Chris Partridge A. Rosemary Watson Rachel Smith Susanne eules Lucy Harvest Clarke Janie Davies Karen Neuberg Jennifer Spector Julia Cowie Amanda Lynch Karen Packwood Sarah Rhys Susie Campbell

Janie Davies

Dancing Tree

Through multimedia, Janie Davies’ practice explores the liminal space where past meets present. The sites she explores have a historical significance and draw upon memory. In the capacity of a psycho-geographer, she traces, records and documents the environment. This mode of tracing is drawn from the choreographic and textural parts of my practice.

julia cowie

Storm Cast

Buckie pendant / pin.

Common whelk egg case, copper, crystal, patina.

Storm Cast explores the narrative of the climate emergency and nature depletion as a result of mankind’s actions and inactions, using detritus found on the tide line. Buckies (common whelks) used to be very common but bottom trawling and chemical poisoning from anti-fowling paint on boats has greatly reduced their numbers. The egg case is now a rare find on the tide line and the shells are becoming almost as rare.

Julia Cowie is a jeweller and metalsmith. Her focus is sustainable, environmentally-aware making, exploring her place in the landscape, nature and history. She works with materials from her local landscape, inspired and informed by traditional processes. The pieces are domestic in scale, using non-precious metal and found objects. Julia’s work explores how jewellery traditions provide frameworks for questions about nature depletion and the climate emergency.

anna masters

(Ropes): Muscle Memory

(The Things That Keep Me Here)

(Audio): System Reset

Anna Masters’ practice explores repair as an artistic process. Working with broken, disregarded or devalued materials, she transforms forgotten elements into artworks. From petal-filled landscapes to clocks that have disentangled themselves from the ticking of time, Masters takes fragments of the lived world and negotiates new futures for them.

karen packwood

Karen Packwood is a writer, dancer-artist and performer. Through her final-year PhD creative writing research at the University of Nottingham, she interrogates silence, post-trauma reclamation of Self, and the unconscious transmission of generational trauma. Her methodology includes textile poetry. Her poetry has been published by Nottingham Voices and The 87 Press.

Anna Torres Mallma

tracing repair

threads of repair

Anna Torres Mallma is a researcher in literature and the humanities based in Chicago. Her developing creative practice brings together writing, mapping, sound, image, and embodied observation to explore how space and movement are experienced through the senses. She is interested in recording and interpreting the visible and invisible traces of care, injury, and healing across human and nonhuman bodies and vulnerable landscapes

A. Rosemary Watson

untangling the invisible palimpsest

A. Rosemary Watson is a cross-disciplinary artist whose practice is primarily concerned with notions of memory, exploring her personal response to, and forming a record of, the constantly shifting and multi-layered nature of memory, which blends and blurs over time into a personalised version of history, whilst encompassing chance, intuition and spontaneity.

RACHEL SMITH

Holding a moment: an attempt to repair

Materials: Vellum paper, graphite, and pins. 

Entomology pins used to secure fine fabrics and insects here become a integral part of the drawing process and wider exploration of damage and repair. What is it that holds a body / a memory / a moment together? Materialising futile attempts to hold something in the face of collapse, while considering methods of dismantling and rebuilding, tethering and unravelling. 

Towards Collapse 

A poem pamphlet including graphite drawings, with original sculptural object, contained in a card box. Produced in an edition of 12.

An inherited collection of books, undermined. A physical process to break down, deface, and digest them. Torn, disordered pages are scattered and thrust together, pulped together into sculptural objects. 

Rachel Smith works across Art and Writing ‘flying through’ existing texts, jumbling expected structures, using association, error, and distraction, exploring how sense might be sought, rejected, and re-fused. Her artist books are held in public collections: Tate Library Special Collections, V&A National Art Library, University College London, and The Henry Moore Institute.

susanne eules

mending

Prunus avium, commonly called wild cherry, is afflicted by Shot-hole disease, caused primarily by the fungus Wilsonomyces carpophilus that creates small holes in cherry leaves and affecting fruit and twigs, not generally lethal to healthy trees. Sewn onto an excerpt from a Plant identification guide.

letters fro & to myselves (1981-1997)

letters fro & to myselves (1981-1997) are enclosed in envelopes made from geographical maps of the respective places from which they were sent. These letters reveal bits and pieces of who I was once, expressing myself in letter writing to my parents, brother and grandparents. /para break/ Some of them have some kind of “historic relevance“. For instance the description of the Ried glacier in Valais, Switzerland and our successful crossing saved a picture of the glacier´s dimension which now after 42 years has retrieved so much, that the crossing to the Bordier Alpine Hut does not touch the glacier at all.

xyu

susanne eules is a German American transdisciplinary artist in the fields of experimental, visual, sonic poetry, performance, visual arts exploring Somatic poetics, Interspecies Translation and Innovative Poetics. German Award for Nature Writing 2023 for miami t:ex[i]ting. Poetry books and chapbooks, the latest nivolog, Contraband, UK 2023, anthology Natur/ver/dichten, Germany 2025.

Chris Partridge

As the Ink Began to weep

In a Small Brown Box

Chris Partridge is a visual artist and poet based in Northumberland. Over the last few years an old coal mine and the surrounding land has been at the centre of her work. A place to reflect, write, draw and be in conversation with. Her recent poetry collection, The Depth of Previous Working is Unknown (Broken Sleep Books, 2026), has been one of the fruits of this ongoing conversation with place, memory and impermanence.

Lucy Harvest Clarke

and we arrived

This track was formed using a found audio diary of my mother when she was travelling and recording to her parents back home. I layered it with vocals and instrumental audio that my partner had sent me from his children as we were getting to know each other. The piece materially reflects the desire to testimony our own version of the world. I wanted to reflect longing, temporality and to sanctify in this gesture the impossibility of these different parts ever meeting.

arrow/ broom

The first image is sketch of a branch of hedge growing through a tube on a wire. The second image is a sketch of a replica I made. These drawings serve as a reference point and a reminder of the simultaneous. The accompanying text reflects the history and current occupants of the hedgerow.

Lucy Harvest Clarke is a writer and artist working with poetry, text based art and installation. Her books include Silveronda (if p then q), EX3 (knives forks and spoons), BABA (Blart Books), A Light Worker (Broken Sleep Books) and The Perfect Hermit (forthcoming from Veer2). https://www.lucyharvestclarke.co.uk

Jennifer Spector

South Calanthia Watercloth

"Cloth Survival Drift Maps", designed during WWII by a British intelligence officer, were 'worn' by pilots to facilitate survival and rescue should an aircraft go down. These evasion maps, depicting large swathes of Europe, were initially printed on silk or mulberry paper, allowing them to be pliable, tolerate saturation with water and remain silent if crumpled, rolled or tucked in a boot. They could be easily hidden or wedged in small places, in a deck of cards, parcels with compasses, or set into a uniform's lining. As part of a pilot's escape kit, they were also useful as sling or tourniquet or as a water-filtering sheath.

Though ingenious, they did not prove successful, having been created with the belief that ocean circulation was steady and charts of mean currents reliable. As later studies revealed, ocean eddies were strong enough to modify currents and could even reverse them. As silk supplies grew scarce, by 1942 cloth escape maps were printed on cuprammonium (Bemberg silk), mulberry paper, calandered taffeta, or viscose rayon. Those that remain are housed in museum or private collections, some having been repurposed and designed as dresses or scarves in the mid 1940s.

South Calanthia Watercloth is a drift assemblage for a place that does not exist. It resides in suspension, lost at sea, in a language of distance. Without tangibile inclusion in an escape kit, survival is reimagined by way of water and paper, a watercloth exploring fixity of notions, such as rescue and wayfinding, reenvisioning what it is to search or yearn for home. If the once available construct of a silken map, worn on the body, could hold key information for survival, in what other language or sphere might there be such aids to navigation, when neither place nor kit offers what can be deftly held.

GLOSSARY

AN'DU' from Shetland, UK dialect; to maintain position of a boat in tide or wind by rowing gently.

FLOTE Old English; wave. Float in current usage, is an early Middle English merger of three Old English nouns: flota (fleet or boat), flote (flock or troop), and flot (a body of water). Old English meanings, now obsolete, evolved from being in a state of floating, to swimming, to a fleet of ships (12th-13th c)

LAND-SHUT from Herefordshire, West Midlands, UK dialect; flood.

PLÉO Ancient Greek; to go by water; sail; float.

SAR Pilots' glossary; an acronym for search and rescue, a unified, cooperative effort which seeks missing aircrafts and assists flyers needing to be found.

SCYP-CRŒFT Anglo-Saxon; an early meaning for navigation; later ship-craft.

Windward

Jennifer Spector is a poet from New York, living in Panama. Her work explores landscape and passages through plaited, poetic processes. She is the author of Hithe (Corbel Stone Press, 2021), and "Thacchen: The Dwelling Body in the Rough House" (chapter) in Dwelling: Cultural Representations of Inhabited Spaces (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Poetry and visual work has appeared in Shearsman, Reliquiae, 14 magazine, Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line, Chant de la Sirene, Molly Bloom, Nature & Sentience, Imminent, Alterity, Litmus, La Vague, Book of Hours: An Artist's Book for the Anthropocene, and PSi Fluid States-Performances of Unknowing. www.jenniferspectorstudio.com / insta: @jespejen

sarah rhys

Afon Tywi: Trace i and ii

Materials: Black card with punched holes. 

Both hole punch drawings show a segment of the Afon Tywi* - before and after a storm - the meander's bend was breached creating both an island and a new oxbow. There are scatterings of ghost oxbow lakes along the floodplain.

The abrupt overnight change in the river's course felt very dramatic- challenging her perception and memory of where the river had 'always flowed'.

* River Towy

Sarah Rhys is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Llansteffan Carmarthenshire and working between west Wales and Bristol. Sarah has a long term interest in the ‘trace’. Recent work includes Cwrwgyl Gwyn/ White Coracle  and Vessel 7 x 7 2024/5. Sarah curates a sometimes gallery Oriel Archipelago in Llansteffan, West Wales and contributed to the publication 'HON- Artistiaid Benywaidd yng Nghymru/ Women Artists in Wales' published by the Hmm Foundation.

amanda Lynch

blobs & dots

Amanda Lynch is a visual artist, researcher and curator exploring disability, social and cultural disablement, wealth, art history and women's representation. Through assemblage, collage, artist books, photography and mail art, I investigate what remains unspoken. Research, conversation and humour underpin my practice, challenging barriers while creating accessible opportunities for connection.

susie campbell

diptych

Materials: bark beetle traces made on dead wood, white embroidery thread, needle, and wooden hoop, white cotton fabric.

asterism

Materials: fragment of deer jawbone, black craft paper, perforations, desk lamp.

thirteen breaths

Materials:  muslin cloth, craft knife cuts, light, shadow, air.

Audio and image made at Albury Downs ancient yew woodlands where I was accompanied by my dogs. 

Susie Campbell makes poetry in textual, textile, visual, and aural forms. Her work engages with problematic histories and ecologies of her local place, its borderlines, what it has lost and what may be emerging. Her publications include Tenter (2020), Enclosures (2021), The Sleeping Place (2023), Wastelands (2025), and Sarsen (2026).

karen neuberg

wind and trees

Karen Neuberg is a Brooklyn, NY, poet and collagist who has found that she loves putting together videos during the foundation and advanced Experimental Ecology of Line courses.

NEW: ECOLOGY OF LINE 2027

FOUNDATION & ADVANCED COURSES

- NOW BOOKING -

Towards an Experimental Ecology of Line:

the 2026 showcase

Janie Davies’ “Dancing Tree” sets the stage: a black and white portrait of a tree whose sinuous growth sediments a history of dynamic decision-making, moving towards or away from light, water, heat and other life forms. Its shape registers the impact of material and energetic forces, of which human activity is one. In Davies' photo it is unclear where the branches of this tree end and the branches of other trees begin. This image might present a relatively uncomplicated, perhaps even romantic, idea of what an ecology of line looks like; but nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

Our second artist, Julia Cowie, a jeweller and metalsmith, “explores the narrative of climate emergency and nature depletion as a result of mankind’s actions and inactions using detritus found on the tidelines”. In the Ecology of Line our Foundation Course, I introduce a series of subcategories to Ingold’s provisional taxonomy of line, to distinguish between living, dead, crafted & transformed threads. The movement from living to transformed usually maps pretty directly onto the transition from naturally-occurring lines to those formed by human intervention. A study of transformed threads leads us through a history of human fabrication with the animate and elemental world, until we reach a raw, naturally-occurring origin: oil, sand, ore etc. While we might be forgiven for placing Davies’ “Dancing Tree” at the animate, naturally occurring end of this spectrum, any seasoned woodlander (even without seeing the background car) would be able to read the traces of human intervention that complicate any simple division between living, dead and crafted categories of thread (3D line). Cowie’s Storm Cast creations, by contrast, are obvious amalgams of once-living, self-crafted and fully transformed lines that have either been found entangled or have been subsequently entwined to create “wearable objects”. These brooches and pins are beautiful mirrors of our current predicament: the chokehold human productivity progressively imposes on the rest of the living world. Studies of the transformation of the AMOC current conducted by Utrecht University argue that it is not change per se that threatens the integrity of our ecological patterning, but the speed of that change. This show celebrates human creativity and imagination in relation to the rest of the animate and inanimate world. It is not that our capacity for innovation and imagination is intrinsically harmful but that the scale and speed of our innovation needs to better balance with the pace of nonhuman creation.

Where Cowie’ and Davies’ work emphasises more-than-human ecologies of line, Anna Masters’ and Karen Packwood’s contributions focus on the ways in which crafted and transformed threads (knots in particular), relate to profoundly human entanglements. How memory is embedded and embodied, personally and environmentally, is a fundamental question for both these artists. 

Anna Torres Mallma’s “Threads of Repair” and “Tracing Repair” makes visible the anatomies of invisible lines in humans and animals. A. Rosemary Watson continues and expands this enquiry in her exploration of the parallels between internal and external tangles in “Untangling the Invisible Palimpsest”. The need for, and desire to, repair pulses like a heartbeat beacon through this show, as Rachel Smith’s pinned paper sculptures, “Holding a Moment: Attempt to Repair” evidence. “Towards Collapse”, Smith’s second piece, materialises a creative response to personal experience that takes on a broader significance in the context of global polycrisis.

If Cowies’ Storm Cast sequence mirrors our current mess, Susanne Eules’ “Mending” materialises the problems inherent in our effort and impulse to repair. Eules uses the dead, pulped body of a tree formed into pages and marked with images of absent trees to mend the holes made by Wilsonomyces carpophilus fungus in cherry leaves. Our impulse to mend is strong, but our knowledge of how and what mending is effective relies upon a clear understanding of what health looks like, and this, it appears, is partial at best. Even if we know where these lines come from, Eules’ subsequent works (“letters fro/to myself 1981-2017” & “XYU”) go on to suggest, we cannot definitively say where they will go.

Chris Partridge’s contributions continue to explore the entwining of material & historical lines initiated by Eules. Lucy Harvest Clarke’s “And We Arrived” uses “found audio of [her] mother” to mend broken lines by bending time, fabricating audible lines that exceed human temporal limitations. Clarke’s transformative work continues in her “Arrow/Broom” contribution. Jennifer Spector’s “South Calanthia Watercloth” extends this effort to create new worlds from old. The transition through these works suggests that mending, repair, transformation and creation meld and migrate, spiralling to create more complex ecologies of line.

Spector’s “Windward”, Rhys’ “Afon Tywi” traces and Campbell’s “Asterism” propel us out of threads and traces into the falling apart of the line, or what Amanda Lynch’s piece identifies as “Dots & Blobs”. Here we make contact with the foundational thematic concerns of the course and Ingold’s provisional taxonomy of line more strongly. Campbell’s “Diptych” creatively explores the transformation of traces (an image of the woodworm’s hunger, an echo of its lively thready body, imprinted into wood) into threads (the additive trace of Campbell’s transformed and crafted thread through cotton (a woven surface of threads). This material meditation on the interweaving of thread and trace unfurls further in Campbell’s final work. “Thirteen Breaths” introduces the complicated intra-relationship between cuts and tears, invisible and visible lines, as tree branches, cotton thread, wind and breath intra-act. This work highlights the elemental weave embodied by a tree - a physical sedimentation of liquid movement (sap) and gaseous currents (air) - as we listen to the internal spaces of a human body, the elemental conjunction of blood, flesh and bone, ghosted in breath.

Campbell’s “Thirteen Breaths” sets us up beautifully for Karen Neuberg’s final elemental meditation that returns us to Davies’ “Dancing Tree” with a newly animated sense of what an arboreal ecology of line might constitute. In Neuberg’s work, waves and flows of air agitate branches and make leaves dance. Trees become portraits of the increasingly unpredictable patterns of wind. Viewed in the context of the flash floods triggered by glacial collapse near the Nepal-Tibet border in August, the potentially catastrophic impact of the AMOC’s (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) weakening and the record-breaking El Niño due to peak in December; these trees seem to be waving a warning.

Dr Camilla A Nelson

Singing Apple Press

ECOLOGY OF LINE 2027

FOUNDATION & ADVANCED COURSES

- NOW BOOKING -