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Steel and Techno-Feudalism in Madeleine Palmer’s 'You Don't Know What I Know'

I am in a face off with Madeleine Palmer’s “Unconscious Expansion” at the George Paton Gallery and I think the work is winning. The edges of the metal feel cold, sharp and harsh. I look intently for where they start and end, wondering how they are stuck together.

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The work is part of a series in the new exhibition You Don’t Know What I Don’t Know by Palmer. Each symbol feels like a distraction for the next one, but also as if it is desperately seeking to symbolise something, to tell me something about itself. I step away from the metal structure. The hypnotic red lines, so precisely depicted, encourage me to look at the building structure from the middle of the work, making the multiple perspectives overwhelming and as though they are entrapping me within them. “Of a (new) kind” feels like it threatens me with a regression towards the past, only colder and more abstract.

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