Line Dancing

In Line Dancing, artist, Tony Wade, drew a circle with a 2km radius on a map of Goole with Junction at its centre to create a line or a boundary. The square Tony has chosen is bisected by this line and lies near a public footpath on the riverbank near Goole railway bridge.

This video work features a sculptural installation of small figures (approx. 30cm tall), along the line. They are made from aluminium wire. They are doing something we can rarely do these days, which is to contact each other. They are holding hands, embracing, and dancing together, along this imaginary line.

Tony says, “we have spent a year living with ever-changing rules, regulation and restrictions, not sure where our boundaries lie. This project has a restriction of its own, working within a 2km radius of Junction. I want to create a 1 to 1 scale map of my chosen square where, in all probability, the only feature on it would be the line (a slight arc) marking the circumference of my circle, an object that exists on my map but has no objective reality on the ground. I wanted to make this line real, if only temporarily.”

The work is inspired in part by. Jorge Luis Borges’ parable ‘On Exactitude in Science’:

“…the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province…. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been… In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”