To Fold a Line
To Fold a Line brings together eight artists associated with the Nsukka School who extend line beyond drawing through their handling of material. Working through folding, weaving, coiling, binding, carving, incising, and painting, they turn line into a visual language that engages material memory, contemporary identity, and thought.
Here, to fold a line is not necessarily to bend it. It is to make line enter material, emerge through the connection and arrangement of materials, occupy space, acquire volume, and generate new relationships. Here, line is woven, painted onto fibre, bound, carved into wood, excavated as grooves, and built up from discarded materials. Across these varied approaches, line moves beyond the surface and becomes a physical presence. Rooted in the experimental legacy of the Nsukka School, these artists extend an approach to line that draws on Indigenous visual traditions, where line, pattern, incision, and geometry have long served as aesthetic and communicative languages.
From Igbo Uli to Ndebele geometric mural art, Yolŋu Rarrk, Māori Kōwhaiwhai, and Whakairo, line and linear structures have taken diverse cultural and material forms. To Fold a Line considers how artists have broadened the horizon of how lines can be created, encountered, and understood in art.
The exhibition also draws from the philosophy of Igwebuike (“strength in multitude”), in which individual elements gain greater presence and force through coming together as a whole. In this exhibition, materials, lines, fragments, gestures, and forms are similarly brought together to create complex wholes. What may appear ordinary or insignificant in isolation acquires new meaning through the artist’s intentionality and process. Rather than presenting the Nsukka School as a fixed historical movement, To Fold a Line positions it as an evolving collective that encourages experimentation while remaining grounded in local knowledge systems.
The exhibition asks how seemingly simple ideas, forms, and materials can be transformed, manipulated, and reorganised into complex wholes.
VIEW CATALOGUE : https://canva.link/mrnpxnsfykhuzdh
