A new exhibition at the University of Hertfordshire will bring together five artists whose work explores the potential of the drawn line and the expanded field of drawing.

Line/Extended , at the university’s Art & Design Gallery, investigates a more interrogative approach to drawing – one that extends outwards into a variety of mediums and disciplines.

Artists Rosana Antolí, Lucy Brown, George Eksts, Jane Grisewood and Andrea V Wright take their various lines for a walk around the three-dimensional space of the gallery.

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Rosana Antolí works across drawing, sculpture, video and performance to interact with and observe our movements, creating patterns out of ordinary human actions. Line/Extended presents Antolí’s site-specific installation Chaos Dancing Cosmos which uses rubber piping and motors to create a concrete, three-dimensional drawing. Forming a continuous line in the gallery, the spinning motors each produce a unique movement to the installation, giving a human characteristic to an inanimate object.

Lucy Brown makes use of old and unwanted clothing and personal artefacts to realise her works. Her weavings, such as the exhibited Offerings, create lines that are both the language and the method for exploring ideas around re-telling, re-claiming and re-configuring the female body image.

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George Eksts uses video, photography, sculpture and printmaking to explore ideas of progress, completion, entropy and the temporary. The exhibition showcases two of his animations – Rehearsal and Shorthand – which reveal Eksts’ interest in the process of editing and transforming meaning by clever, playful edits.

Jane Grisewood works across drawing, photography, print and performance. For the opening reception of Line/Extended Grisewood recreates her two-hour drawing performance Blind Lines, in which she draws with graphite directly onto the gallery wall with her eyes closed throughout. Visitors will be invited to replicate the action and sensation of drawing ‘blind’. The outcome will remain on the wall for the duration of the exhibition.

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Andrea V Wright’s process-based practice explores the relationships between weight and lightness, strength and fragility, the perceived and illusory in a play of opposites. Her site-specific installations such as the exhibited Vertical Ascension create ‘impossible planes’ where the shadows of her geometric structures are traced onto the surfaces of architectural spaces using tape.

Exhibition curators Inna Allen and Elizabeth Murton say: “The works in the exhibition reflect the importance of creative experimentation and engagement with materials, processes, sites and ideas. The line is present and consistent throughout. Whether transcribed within drawings, installations, textile works or moving images, the line is interrogative, exploratory, active – and extended.”

Line/Extended coincides with the national Big Draw Festival – the world’s biggest celebration of drawing. In addition to other related events, UHArts is organising a spatial drawing workshop run by exhibiting artist Andrea V Wright. For further information and booking, visit www.uharts.co.uk