Working within her practice of traditional landscape drawing, using classical drawing media, Sallie Moffatt continues her exploration of the expressive and symbolic possibilities of the descriptive line.

Working in isolation for months at a time in the Outback, without technology or communication, she researches the balance between line as a conscious representation of a visual experience and line as an unmediated experience. At its core, it is a search for a simple set of relationships that describe the dominant sensory experience as it relates to the page. Simple drawing.

The marks are at times simple and uncomplicated representations of a scene in staccato, veering towards the animated, while at others they are driving neurotic attempts to link a series of visual points into a momentarily 'true' relationship.

A line consists of two points, and the set of subpoints between them, and it would seem a relatively simple task to join these two points. However, considering that each subpoint has its own set of subpoints, and so on to infinitely small increments of perception, each of which require a process of acute attention and recognition to connect them, then drawing a single line with any temporal truth, such as it is, requires a degree of concentration which borders on the unhinged.

This unhinged concentration is what Moffatt holds out to us in ‘The Loaded Line’. It’s a reclaiming of an overshadowed Romantic worldview: respect for the natural, the simple, the poetic and the ungoverned.