Collette Broeders
“Walking a Line”, Performance Remnant (2019)
graphite on vellum
72 x 36 in. | $650
My work explores the ways in which reiterated rituals transform particular times and spaces using my body as both material and process for drawing. Through drawing and performance, I make patterns, or navigational lines, that disclose the “where” and “when,” the tangible and intangible, of a place. By walking on ground, fabric, paper, or vellum, often on a graphite text, I use my body as an instrument of absorption and inscription: the text colors me, marks the soles of my feet, as I “walk it” into place.
Duration and dwelling animate my work. My performances often last hours, either in galleries or in site-specific public areas, in quarries, in silos, in forests, or in factories, as I respond to a particular space and its exigencies and offer my own history or the history of its occupants and walk my own memory into its textures.
“Walking a Line” is a series of ritualized gifts. As I walk a path—in ways intimate and contemplative, meditative and hypnotic—I attempt to offer as much as I occupy, to reveal traces as much as to leave them, to embody the history of the place as much as I change it. Interiorizing and distributing text and memory in these ways are also cleansing. I return specificity to a place after I have transformed it into its own kinetic, universal act: walking.
© Collette Broeders