Headgear: 6 Meters under Drawing

Kathryn Smith wrote of Unite's work "Africa's rich and contentious mining histories provide the point of departure for Jeannette Unite's Earthscars on the level of both the material and metaphor. Closely aligned with environmentally conscious art production, Unite's body of work is site-specific in the sense that she has employed diamondiferous materials, minerals, metal oxides and sands from various significant sites in the production of her work, including making her own pastels with these materials. Toying with the traditional understanding of "value", Unite has perpetrated her own brand of alchemy. For a project that began as an identification of wounds that don't heal ("mining" as a reflection of a personal journey, nor unlike Freud's parallel between psychoanalysis and archaeology, perhaps), the dense metaphorical possibilities contained in Unite's geological materials have resulted in a slightly different take on the rather hackneyed memory-history-landscape genres of much local contemporary art."