Invisible Lines
Some thoughts on hidden boundaries that we feel but don’t see
I’ve been thinking about lines this week — the ones that you can see and the invisible ones that you can only feel. There are spade-fulls of both in Frank Auerbach’s charcoal drawings from the 1950s and 60s, which I saw in an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London on Thursday. It is powerful art, and I’ll come back and talk more about it in a moment.
But first, more about lines. I’ve been reading a book by the geographer Dr Maxim Samson called Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World. Geography isn’t usually a subject I avidly lean towards, but I was tempted by the intriguing title and it was a fascinating read. Samson’s book is an exploration of the hidden geographies that affect the way we exist in and move through our physical environments. Rather than focusing on natural boundaries such as oceans, rivers, forests and mountains, he talks about the immaterial boundaries that we can’t see but whose presence impacts on us and how we engage in the world every day.
These are not lines that are visible, but we experience them nonetheless. We sense them. We feel them. We consciously and subconsciously process and act on them. Walking around any big city, for example, we might notice how demographics change, how architecture changes, and how…
