If I say ‘asymptote’, what do you feel? For me, something in the word gently pierces the body, like a needle sliding through dough. I don’t harden against it, I soften around it. The word describes a mathematic phenomenon: an asymptote is a line that a curve approaches as it moves toward infinity, but never meets. Or, in reverse: a line that constantly approaches a curve that it does not meet at any infinite distance. We get this curve by graphing a function. It is an exercise that helps those interested understand the long term behaviour of systems. Part of me wants to dismiss the word as devoid of emotion, to allow it its neutrality. But I’m pulled to feel something about it instead. Imagine the formulation of this never-ending line as it extends out across infinity. Imagine the curve that grows alongside it. To do so is a new way to realise the futility of any attempt to comprehend infinity. As the lines run off the imagined page, so too the mind. Do you, like me, find yourself cast out? It is also disconcerting, in a way, the image of these two lines lengthening in perpetuity, at once independent from and co-dependent on, or at least consequential to, one another. Without the curve, there is no asymptote. Without the asymptote, the curve loses meaning. Replace one curve with another, and the asymptote, too, needs replacing. What is it to exist solely in relation to something else that, by virtue of its very trajectory, cannot be seen or felt, that cannot be met? To face obliteration should that other thing change or cease to be? Asymptote, Written by Emma Pegrum Read more on the website. Images courtesy the artist and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert