Sarah Salvatore
“Cycles of Labour and Love”

I know the self to be split into interiors and exteriors. Deep wells and shallow containers.

A thin thread pulled from some inner crevice now pools at your feet.

It is your job as artist, maker, human, to see why.

To probe at that unidentified shape oozing out of your mesh veil. Watch it turn itself inside-out as it reconfigures into something entirely new. It cannot speak a common language, so we must labour with this love. Remember that it may not even be fully formed yet, and understand that sometimes these things never do.

But we must give them to the world anyway.

Innards to innards.

Opening night for West Space’s 2026 Fundraiser, LABOUR & LOVE invites you in with the door wide open. A boom-boom-bass to syncopate everyone upon arrival.

Curated by Gabriela Renee Williams, the fundraiser celebrates all those who shepherd with their craft, time and effort. The money raised returns directly to the artistic community, ensuring new works can be commissioned and artistic freedom is prioritised. I think of how sweet this cycle is — that someone's labour can generate more labour. Sweet, though I must also acknowledge, gruelling. Born from necessity as much as devotion. Even after the ruthless night-shift, day-job, hand-cramping, tender-hearted pain of it all, this community continues extending itself, for itself.

Sounding its own heartbeat.

The first artwork I notice is perched on a low, wooden table: a satin-green, soft sculpture in which a hand-like structure hangs limply over the edge. Katy B Plummer describes Ghost Hands for Holding as 'a portal,' a 'soft proxy' — words I store in my pocket as I continue through the space.

Next to it stands a milk-white ceramic, with a 'faithful fish' resting atop a tilted head. This untitled figure by Philip Kitto has a hand cast over its stomach, standing like a server waiting to be needed. The placement and proximity of the two work in tandem, both abstracted prescriptions of humaneness, proffering themselves to the viewer. At least, these are my impressions and I cannot help the immediacy in crafting this narrative, nor do I want to. Immediacy and impressions, whether sensical or surreal, are markers of innards I seek in these exterior forms.

I became struck by a tiny photograph titled The Sound of Play by Razieh Jafari Alavi. Taken in the Iranian neighbourhood of Mashhad, young boys await their turn with a soccer ball. Sunlight streams in from the top-left corner of the frame, pouring over the low buildings. An anticipatory feeling settles in my toes, reminiscent of childhood: tired legs, short hiccup-like breaths, cold air cooling my throat, feet squashing the grass, and an amber afternoon light setting in a horizon warming my skin. The photograph becomes a portal I fall directly into.

With over 100 artworks, countless other impressions leave their mark. I wonder what has stirred in others, images and symbols falling deep into our own individual wells. Who knows when, and in what form, they will remerge. Turning yet again, outside-in. Inside-out.

Leaving the gallery, the outside world feels like a new reality to familiarising myself with. I stand by the balcony digesting what I had consumed. Looking down at the yard below, I noticed grown men playing a make-shift version of their own soccer, with a found ball. The image of the young boys spliced over the scene like distorted film, exposed twice.

Still, the boom-boom base sounds off, muffled now by distance.

I take with me things I had not entered with:

a satin hand,
a faithful fish,
afternoon light...

This is how it continues: carried forward in cycles of labour and generosity. The same thread that once pooled at our feet now moves through each other's hands, taut between them.