Beschrijving

“Desire Lines” is an exhibition catalogue that explores the concept of the “desire line” — paths formed by human or animal movement beyond planned routes — through historical and contemporary visual art. The book presents a dialogue between curator Benjamin Spiers and art historian John-Paul Stonard, tracing how artists have represented trajectories of desire, deviation, and improvisation in landscapes, architecture, and human behaviour. These “lines” become metaphors for life’s shortcuts, resistances, and alternative mappings.

The first section maps the idea across time: from ancient pilgrim paths and colonial landscapes to modern urban drift and environmental tracing. Works from diverse artists are illustrated and discussed with the aim of showing how desire lines mark both social history and personal agency — where the formal becomes informal, the designated becomes improvised. The catalogue emphasises the materiality of these lines: worn tracks, digital traces, speculative diagrams, all speaking of movement and intention outside the official plan.

In the final section the authors reflect on the broader implications: what do desire lines tell us about how humans interact with space, power and convention? How do we create our own routes—and how does the landscape create us? The book invites the reader to see art as path-making, and to view physical and metaphorical detours as sites of resistance, memory and possibility.

This catalogue is for the Benjamin Spier’s exhibition Desire Lines at Saatchi Yates in September 2021. The catalogue includes a catalogue essay by John-Paul Stonard. The twenty of Benjamin Spiers’ paintings spanning 1998 to 2021 are illustrated in colour throughout; including insightful images of four works in progress later finished in 2021.