To Eb and Flo - Rachel O'Neill

The objects, drawings and animations in Kate Whelen's installation do not believe that the unconscious is ever asleep. The unconscious that Whelen's installation converses with may position itself at the farthest corners of being asleep; it may go to sleep and it may wake, but it is never asleep.

Take for example a broom featured in one of the DVD works from the series "The Pythagorean Comma". The broom is fitted with wheels so as to extend out from the bristles, lifting both it and its function clean off the ground. The wheelie-broom, in the hands of the artist herself, mimes the movements of a broom, generating a resonance with the Charlie Chaplin soundtrack.

It is as if the broad sweeps were the instrument of the sound itself. There seems a clumsy attempt at transcendence here. The bristles literally glide sonorously on thin air, while the wheels clunck heavily over the floor.

To wake or sleep on wheels begins with an idea. In each part of the installation there is a sense of the fortitude of ideas. Ideas show up as both shadows - accessible only as inferior worldly things and at the same time ideas in Whelen's work are as much accessible things in time and space that have turned themselves/their shadows around and now act independently - the shadows are doing it for themselves so to speak. Included in Whelen's installation is an illustrated narrative based on two sisters called Ebony and Florence. That Eb and Flo are first and foremost active characters in time, and only then metaphors of time, suggests an experiential relation to metaphor, and of the splitting of one idea with another. As characters in time they explore what it is to exact.

In Whelen's work, to exact doesn't necessarily align with fact as she proposes that artwork, like the shadow of an idea, is not merely true or faithful or a stand in but exploratively exacts. To exact, has a similar rhythm to repetition, a maneuver that is compelled in a particular direction, but is conscious that it is also making up this direction as it goes along - that now and again it puts on wheels. As viewers in Whelen's installation we are made aware of the anticipation we feel as our unconscious becomes unconscious; the anticipation of an experience that will not last and that will at the same time outlast memory.

Right - Kate Whelan 'The Pythagorean Comma' - DVD still, 2006