Sunday Salon 39

The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK

Anna Fairchild | Desire Line

Saturation Point Sunday Salon 39

March 2026

A Desire Line (or Desire Path) is an undesignated route taken on foot through urban or peripheral urban (peri-urban) spaces. These are often physically recognisable as rough path lines across urban green spaces, or worn-out areas of paving, or are evident in the broken edges of kerbstones, patched with other materials. In some cases, we may see a surprising use of materials such as pieces of carpet, broken bricks or fragments of wood.

I have previously used a Desire Line technique I call ‘Brutal Foraging’, to explore the often overlooked and under-examined corners of urban and peri-urban spaces. I maintain that this intuitive way of navigating these spaces, by taking unmarked and less-used routes, can act both as a quiet form of resistance against the ways in which urban planning often has designs upon us, and as a way to generate visual ideas which propose alternative ways to think about how we might share and inhabit these spaces.

Continuing this abiding interest in these under-examined spaces, Desire Line looks to what is noticed, looking down, underneath, and at the edges, corners and the rear of buildings, primarily within the UK but inflected with observations and recollections of my time spent living in Istanbul, Turkiye (1989-2001). I acknowledge that colour, surface pattern and geometric shapes and forms within the culture have heavily influenced my work. In addition to this, the way in which a city such as Istanbul is organically and socially navigated on a daily basis has provided many of the starting points for my work since the early 1990s.

It is in these visually under-examined but much-used places that I begin to form ideas for both my two- and three-dimensional work; each informing the other through a melding of photographic and sculptural practice, through surface, texture and structural observations.

I intend that by noticing and observing these things, and through process-led material thinking, new images and forms emerge, giving agency to shapes, forms and textures within the under-examined spaces.

I closely align my work and practice with what Jane Bennett describes as ‘thing power’ in her 2010 book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Bennett writes that rocks, electric pylons, lichen or fungi, a pavement, are all active forces, which challenge the idea that agency is exclusive to humans. Bennett describes this flattened ontology as a call to think differently about how we view entities and the worlds we inhabit, comprising the organic, inorganic, animate and inanimate.

My work explores how bringing attention to materials, fragments and elements, noticed by taking such Desire Line routes, does not aim to re-create the experience of them, but rather infers a disruption of the hierarchy and a call to thinking differently. This, I maintain, is a quiet act of resistance against the ways in which the planning of urban and peri-urban spaces has designs upon us. By using widely available materials such as gravel grids, carpet tiles, gravel, ferrous oxide slag (a by-product of the iron-smelting industry) and packaging, alongside more traditionally used sculptural materials such as Jesmonite plaster, new objects and surfaces emerge. The non-hierarchical way in which materials coalesce, or sit alongside each other, situates itself within this flattened ontology. The observations emerge in new collaborations and palimpsests within the work, thriving within new observations of the precariously present, under-examined, unused or maligned.

Anna Lohenhaupt Tsing writes about ideas which align with this in her 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World; On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. She uses the idea of ‘third nature’ – that which manages to live and thrive, despite capitalism. Tsing uses the highly prized Matsutake mushroom as her ‘protagonist’, which, with its own network and agency, collaborates and thrives in spaces of decimation. Tsing suggests that with precarity being a condition of our times, an explicit sensing of precarity is possibly what we need.

The work shown in Desire Line (floor installation) examines the structure and form of precariously held together or fragmented components and materials. This aims to bring attention to the physically broken and repaired, the ad-hoc use of the everyday as well as quiet observation of the incidental organic/inorganic. Observations of the glow of a green traffic light against a smut-covered piece of urban foliage; a shard of fluorescent orange street light reflected on broken wet paving slabs; a quietly growing plant-like form emerging from rubble, are all reflected in this work.

Stencil-painted carpet tiles sit alongside fragmented Jesmonite-filled gravel grids. Within these elements of the work, patterns are both repeat-printed and disrupted by broken sections and layers of stencilled paint. Here, the disruption of texture and pattern could be formally seen to align with broken systems which may only be repaired through a network of organic/inorganic, animate/inanimate agency, which is resistant to imposed planning. The work and material processes used set out to explore these relationships and ‘collaboration’.

I am interested in how unintentional design and organising assemblages within under-examined or ‘contaminated’ spaces coalesce and re-form, occurring through the balance of intention and the incidental encounter with process-led material thinking.

The four pieces of two-dimensional work in the exhibition use photographic, digitally collaged material printed on brushed aluminium. During my research into materials for the floor installation, I became fascinated by online photographs of wholesale gravel aggregate. Used in building work and as a constituent of concrete, this formed part of my ongoing interest in Brutalist and Modernist architecture. These were most notably seen in my ‘Brutal Foraging’ visits to Luton, Bedfordshire and Stevenage New Town, Hertfordshire.

I began to screenshot the gravel aggregate images: Cotswold; White Limestone; Cheshire; Yorkshire Cream; Black Basalt. These screenshots were then collaged into what I describe as ‘digital aggregate wallpaper’. These ‘wallpapers’ formed the material which I then used to edit and ‘cut’ into sections to create digitally collaged drawings, printed on brushed aluminium. These collages are loosely based on observed fragments of, for example, the Stevenage telephone exchange, and flyovers and underpasses on the A1(M) and A505 in Hertfordshire, and the Luton Mall (Arndale Centre) façade and ABC cinema in Bedfordshire. Here the work focuses again on looking more closely, and aims to bring attention to the ‘Brutal Beauty’, austerity and raw truth of the materials inherent in these overlooked, or often maligned, structures.