Maps of our shared interior Gus Hasley-Hayford Smac Gallery Publication, 2011
 

I have always enjoyed picking up and handling stones. Some simply want to be rolled between fingertips, others to sit in the bowl of a cupped palm, a few are like jewels that carry the narrative of their creation mapped across their surfaces. Hold one of those up to the sunlight and it can act like a temporal kaleidoscope. You can still observe granitic crystalline explosions in their translucence - sparkling micas, feldspars and glistening quartzes, trapped in their fabric. Look a little closer and you can feel the presence of the first bacterial life-forms that developed in the proto-organic moment of fermenting mineral soup. But right down within these stones, there is something else, something unknown and perhaps unknowable.

 
 

Brush your fingers across a stone buried in a pocket and feel its coolness, roughness, its weight and you sense it just there beyond conscious perception, that something else, that something almost unknown and perhaps unknowable.

 
 

Whitney McVeigh has constructed a series of two-dimensional sculptures that negotiate that ineffable cultural space. These are maps of our shared interior: acrylic on paper works that capture self and its shadow, that mine deep into what we might be. These are a-temporal totems drawn from our shared proto-consciousness - things that look like they were always there, waiting for McVeigh to reveal them. She has taken us closer to something else, something unknown, to something that communes with the unknowable – and there she has found something of us.

 
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