Desire Lines is a term used in landscape architecture, to describe that path worn in the grass that veers from the paved one. It was borrowed by web designers to name the function of using search terms within a website.

It’s all about leaving traces of where people desire to go.

Thinking about this concept Ramsay developed systems for making lines, where the materials themselves played a role in the mark making. Some of the systems mark time, some are encoded dates, such as “Gratitude for Agnes Martin.” This painting uses the colors of Martin’s work “Gratitude” and encodes the year of her birth (in pink) and her passing (in gray) on a white ground.