Sophie Tottie

Since the 1990s, the Swedish artist Sophie Tottie has created expansive, abstract drawings that vary the motif of horizontal lines.

In her large-scale work Written Language (line drawings) XI (2009), which is part of the Schering Stiftung Collection, Tottie used black pigmented ink and a dip pen to draw lines across an upright sheet of paper. She began to draw horizontal, straight lines at the sheet’s upper margin, repeating them in regular intervals. The manual drawing process resulted in line deviations to which the artist responded. In each successive drawing step, she echo-like copied the previous line, allowing for the emergence of wavy lines that increasingly deviated from the strictly horizontal orientation.

Tottie sees drawing as a physical activity in which the movement of hand and arm – influenced by power, posture, and position – leaves traces on the paper. The lines are expressions of an activity and thus irregular, tentative, and shot through with errors, drops, or stains.

Like a seismograph measuring the earth’s tiniest tremors, Tottie’s lines record the delicate, often unconscious movements and variations of her body. In the resulting drawing process, an envisioned order dissolves, making the body assert itself instead.