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. 

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. 

Palmer’s metallic structures and acrylic backgrounds pose questions about our relationship with traditional ideas in a modern context. The buildings she references are medieval religious structures, whose sharp depictions strip them of any romanticism potentially associated, presenting them instead as prisons. Sitting in the middle of this language, the metallic structures feel like a code the viewer is meant to decipher, though perhaps the struggle of trying to achieve such a task is instead the point. 

When I write to Palmer over email about her works, she tells me that people often search for truth by returning to the comfortable and familiar. The aggressive nature of her structures counters these ideas; the search for facts and knowledge is proposed as something that is hard and looks physically confronting, as well as being highly subjective to interpretation. That in her work which resembles weapons of the medieval period to me may look like a letter instead to someone else. This battle of interpretation places social and discursive battles for what is true in a physical setting, one that stepping into looks as though it would physically hurt. 

The metallic works ground these ideas into physical objects that we can engage with. So much of how we speak about technology personifies very material structures which make up anything between large language models to the electric networks whose cables lie deep in the ocean floor and keep the world running. Palmer directly references this in the physicality of her compositions.

Throughout our conversation, we touch on other topics like techno-feudalism and what she calls the “capitalisation of the uninformed”. Palmer references Yanis Varoufakis when speaking of “our regression back to an intangible serfdom, labouring with our attention to the leaders of big tech, the ‘kings’ of the post-capitalism age”. She compares the power of church and religion to that of the digital age where the gatekeepers of knowledge act not through information depravity, but rather overload. She plays with legibility, diversion and misinformation in her works and encourages reflections on how information is created and manufactured. 

The process of art-making itself becomes a radical act against the systems of oppression she speaks to. Palmer speaks about deconstruction being necessary to challenging systems of power, and says the artist’s strength lies in “identifying and projecting this to a viewership creating capacity for change and realisation”. 

There is clear deconstruction and reframing in her works, and as I try to decipher what the dense steel structure is telling me, I feel the weight of the abundance of information.

You Don’t Know What I Don’t Know is showing at George Paton Gallery until 10 September.

Photo credit: Astrid Mulder