For more than ten years now, Pauline Delwaulle has been following lines, joining points, taking planes, walking paths, gliding on kayaks, climbing summits, moving around on
interactive maps, travelling the world with her fingertips, measuring it, climbing it, filming it, photographing it, looking for the right colour, the exact luminosity, walking towards what she doesn’t know. She inhabits the earth by walking through it, not by occupying a place, but by taking an active part in what happens there. Close to the methodologies of fundamental research, the artist is fascinated by the inventiveness that scientists deploy to produce data that is useful to knowledge. […] For example, the artist tracks down the researchers from the Oceanology and Geosciences Laboratory who survey the beach at Dunkirk several times a year after each storm to record the coastline. Produced thanks to the GPS carried by the walkers, this line designates the limit up to which sea water can reach. But it also represents the kilometers covered by these modern-day Don Quixotes, driven by their persistent project to symbolically represent the boundary between land and sea.

[…] When the artist finally stops, at the edge of the paths she is helping to sketch, she looks up and squints. There she measures the sky, calibrates it and tries to reproduce its colors. Part of this long-term work is on display in the basement of the École d’art de Belfort, where a gigantic kite invites us to look up. It is none other than a large-scale reproduction of the cyanometer developed in 1789 by the mountaineer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a color chart of all the blues in the sky, designed to assess their intensity (53 blues, 21 threads, 4 Beaufort, 2018). The artist then translated this palette into as many flags (Nice weather – blue skies, 2017), which were then hung at the Ouessant semaphore as if from the shrouds of boats, exposing all the possible colors of good weather to the eyes of sailors.

1. Tim Ingold, Lines – a brief history, ‎Routledge, 2007
   
   
   Exerpt from : Sophie Lapalu, “Tracer des chemins, emprunter des lignes”, in Cahier du 19, Crac, Sept. 2022.