L.I.N.E, 2021
Gold Thread, Debt, and Interest-Based Measurement
The work originates from the artist’s experience during the COVID-19 lockdown. Despite holding a salaried position, financial circulation became unstable. To manage short-term expenses, she pawned her late father’s gold ring, weighing 1 baht. The loan provided temporary liquidity, while placing the object under a system of interest, deadlines, and the constant risk of forfeiture.
The work originates from the artist’s experience during the COVID-19 lockdown. Despite holding a salaried position, financial circulation became unstable. To manage short-term expenses, she pawned her late father’s gold ring, weighing 1 baht. The loan provided temporary liquidity, while placing the object under a system of interest, deadlines, and the constant risk of forfeiture.
For this project, the original amount of gold—one baht, 96.5% pure—was flattened and drawn into a thin thread measuring 2.565 meters. Its length corresponds to the total amount required to redeem the ring, including accumulated interest. Debt is thus converted into a measurable extension, where financial obligation becomes a physical dimension.
Interest operates through time. Early repayment reduces its weight, while delay intensifies both cost and the risk of seizure. When deadlines cannot be met, extension becomes the only means of preventing loss. Each extension accrues additional interest, binding the borrower into a prolonged cycle of negotiation marked by precarity.
During installation, the gold thread is stretched tightly between the wall and the floor. Its extreme thinness renders it almost invisible, while its tension remains physically present. The line functions simultaneously as a boundary, a measure, and a threshold. It marks the fragile balance between stability and dispossession.
Developed in response to an exhibition framework addressing Southeast Asian socioeconomic conditions, L.I.N.E situates personal experience within broader systems of informal credit, debt circulation, and survival under economic pressure. The work reflects on how financial vulnerability operates not only through large-scale policy but through everyday decisions, temporary solutions, and inherited responsibility.
By materialising debt as a nearly imperceptible structure, the project reveals how economic systems discipline bodies and futures through duration, uncertainty, and conditional access. Stability appears not as security, but as a continuously negotiated state.
