Sheep Sheltering by Maria Simonds Gooding

Maria attended the Bath Academy Corsham as an ‘Independent Student’ where she first describes her consciousness awakening to the power of the line. “Somehow it came out of one of the classes that Adrian Heath gave, working from the model, the life-class – he asked us to take a line through the model in any direction. He didn’t want any representational form of the model, but he wanted to have a sense of where the line started and ended. I suppose, without spelling it out, he wanted us to tune into the importance of the power of line. For the majority of the students in the class this wasn’t particularly interesting. For me opening my mind into something as relevant and free as a line without having the distraction or the burden of representation, when that was only for its own sake, changed everything. It gave me wings and let me out of a trap door.”