Christine Hiebert's blue drawings 2003-4

Christine Hiebert. Wall Drawing / The Drawing Room, Easthampton, NY 2004; blue adhesive tape, glue on wall. 11'-4h x 20'w

This is an artist who has made drawings with blue masking tape since 2000.  in this 2012 conversation she mentions when working graphically before computers learned how to draw everything for us, she would make curves using very thin tapes.  Yes, I remember this, a physical relationship between hand, tape and eye that was sensual and scaled to the arm: the automatic marks of the anthropos.

On her own website she talks about how the lines are flung out into space as a negotiation of the unknown, or the unexperienced.  It seems that how they land on the wall is not unlike a map that precedes experience, indeed, frames experience.  The selection of certain marks, the choosing of certain widths of tape, of placements, draws a map of desire and intention.  These are landscapes – they follow mapping conventions that are difficult to ignore.  However, just because they look like maps does not mean they are maps.  They are drawings that delineate planar areas where the borders of each territory are made significant: nothing is blurred, or ambiguous.  Some are strong, some weak – have I slipped into metaphor again?  Yes.  They are pieces of blue masking tape on white paper and white walls that spur us to think of things.

Christine Hiebert. Wall Drawing / The Drawing Center (view #4)

and a very small image, but showing that the scale is way beyond the hand and arm, it is now the wall, the ladder and the whole body. 

Christine Hiebert. RoundTrip. A wall drawing for the Pinakothek der Moderne, 2005