Working on the wall
The blank wall is a gift. I try to begin work at the site empty of ideas, in order to be open to what thoughts may arise there. Developing the ideas directly on the wall is more interesting to me than transferring them from a small sketch: I can see the changes in actual scale, instantly. Many drawing solutions become visible over the course of my time spent onsite, though inevitably I leave the room with just one. This fi nal outcome is always something I didn’t anticipate. The process can be unsettling, but it is how I prefer to work.
     The blue tape lines are the most "unfastened"; I think of them as being fl ung out into space to negotiate the unknown. I have spent years sending out this sort of tape line along interior walls of various sites. I use lines to mark out visual footholds for a kind of mental travel—travel that suggests both freedom and belonging in the space. The architecture is fixed, but the mind wanders within it. I think this is how we develop a sense of place.
     For me, drawing starts with the problem of the line, how to form it and how to follow it. In a way, it ends with the line, too. The line remains independent, searching, never completely absorbed by the community of its fellows.

—Christine Hiebert
(excerpt from Davis Museum brochure for Reconnaissance, August 2009)