BIOGRAPHY
THE LINE MARKER PRACTICE is an ongoing project-to-project studio process using the road, its line marker schematic and paint as a creative index. Since 1996, C.Wells has developed a method and means exampled in paintings, installations, performance, text works, time-based chronicles, public art and research-based interventions. Projects have concentrated on the colloquial nuances of specific geographies and their markings or conversely, addressed the line marker as a global omnipresent signifier. ‘Landscape’ as a construct and subject has been explored as city, country, rural, urban and the spaces in-between.
Beginning in 2001, attention towards the heritage or historicity of the line marker traced its origins to Michigan, USA and the biographical narrations of its inventor and notions of transportation from the cusp of industrial modernity in 1911 to present day. Repeated research delves in Detroit’s Department of Transportation and subsequent studio explorations surrounding notions of biography and narrative have been a scion exploration.
Painting as idea and as process concurrently develops as studio produced works and exhibitions surrounding notions of: lines, marking, mapping, geographical shared latitudes, graffiti as a related language, the element of distance visually captured by thickness, the line marker as a device within pop culture. Processes of making have summed up an intent and been curatorially received as: new treatises of landscape painting, explorations of open and or imposed meanings of coded regulated language, the city as image, narrations on labour and analog technology, notions of the everyday and painting’s ‘found object’.
Working akin in spirit to that of the topographer, executing ideas like a contemporary journeyman avid for information; Wells’ artworks are creatively itinerant and multi-disciplined, investigating a language that oscillates between representation and abstraction.
Social Abstraction.