I don't know when or where I first came across the notion of a desire line or desire lines. It feels like it's one of those things I always just knew about and therefore assumed everyone else did too - just common knowledge. The more I talk about it to people and ask if they've ever come across the term, the more I'm realising that it isn't such common knowledge. In fact, so far, no one I've spoken to about it has heard of it.
For me though, and other makers I now realise, this is a powerfully evocative, super-charged pair of words DESIRE LINES (I prefer the plural)- each one a little bomb of inspiration which together trigger chain reactions of ideas for making.
I've always had a desire to make things, mainly three dimensional objects that I can make solely with my hands. I'm not a lover of tools. As I'm making the often slow, concentrated, repetitive movements of the basketry techniques I now use seem to stimulate thought processes around and about the work in progress.
I've always been something of a collector too. I have collections of words, phrases and potential titles for my work. I think of basketry as a meditative process through which I can follow a line of thought, collecting and gathering together ideas along the way to give expression to my heart's desire.
I enjoy making abstract, open, linear forms. Many basketmakers are drawn to lines - it goes with the territory and much of the material. I'm particularly drawn to the narrative qualities of accumulations of lines - notations, writings and storylines. So it goes - nothing new. Yet we try to tell own story somehow.
DESIRE LINES 2010, painted apple, dogwood and rattan, 95 x 40 x 12cms
I've been collecting desire lines too for sometime (see later posts) but this piece made in March 2010 was the first expression of some of the research and ideas. The applewood came from a small tree in my garden, the red dogwood from waste ground in my home town of Sheffield - I collected it with my grandchildren Jackson and Scarlett. As well as the three branching lines crossing and disrupting the lines of stencilled applewood there are more lines of dried-blood-red dogwood threading down the channels of woven rattan. They can be glimpsed between the lines as kinetic points of colour.
As a small child growing up in the industrial east end of Sheffield I was often taken by my grandparents into the nearby Peak District, there to follow the desire lines of sheep, rabbits and Sunday ramblers across the moors. In the 1930s my grandparents had joined a mass tresspass to ensure free access to the moors by workers in the surrounding cities. The moors were the lungs of these cities - much more than a breath of fresh air they were a vital organ for bodies that were otherwise choked with sulphurous fumes and smog, heat and dust. I spoke about this recently with conceptual artist Kate Murdoch whose Scottish family had similar experiences of the country-side above Muirkirk.
I first showed the piece at my interview for the Craft Council's Hothouse programme for emerging makers. No one asked about the title - there were more searching lines of enquiry needing answers.
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