Simone Kearney
DIGS
Sept 20 - Nov 8

with a reading by David Gorin, Zoë Hitzig, and Simone Kearney

Photo courtesy of the artist

Text by Zachary Pace

GUEST is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new sculptures and works on paper entitled DIGS, by the artist and writer Simone Kearney, whose current work deals in stone, earth, watercolor, and text. A poetry reading of her writing will take place at the gallery on September 20, 2025, for the opening of the show.

Here, eight hand-carved stone pieces are displayed on individual blocks of rammed earth. Arranged in a grid, each object is its own island, but also part of one ecosystem. The works are mined from the ground, like coughed-up rubble in a field—some kind of underlying original substance, compacted into bits, shaped by a haptic sense of play. Sculpted from soapstone, marble, alabaster, and rhyolite, the forms bring to the surface the substance of the stones—composite layers like brushstrokes of color and pattern. They uncover the grain of material striations, the swathes of mauve and charcoal, the aqua and opal flakes of light, the interior fissures and translucencies.

The stones in DIGS resemble a grid of hieroglyphs. They could be an alphabet, some sort of earth-language. But if it’s a language, where does sense lie? If there is sense, it’s visceral. Existing on a spectrum from less-touched to more fully rendered, the sculptures represent the artist’s alternating practice of “digging” and receptivity. “Making has been a form of excavation in some sense, excavating from my unconscious,” says Kearney, whose images, forms, sensations, and emotions move through the stone, revealing stone’s fluidity. In one sculpture, the rounded curve of a ballooning fingertip (a rock that comically appears filled with air) mirrors the spherical, silhouetted bunny ears of the sculpture beside it. The lightest form, a ghost, is carved from the heft of stone, and the “O” of its mouth repeats in other forms—like the navel of a dream that can’t be spoken, around which images churn. Forms piggyback on one another, as if the stones were chit-chatting. A pattern is suggested, but then lost, straying off like a stray thought, folding in or becoming something else.

Displayed outside of the main gallery space, the ovals on paper are part of Kearney’s Waterstone series, which emerged when the artist, in her own words, “let color bleed and stain, transported by water on the page, to see where it went. I was an occasion for the image or forms that formulated in the watercolor—an occasion for them to do what they did, for them to go wherever they went. I watched and witnessed. Maybe that’s why they are eyes.” Their overlapping rings of ultra-vibrant pigment resemble the eye of a wild animal or the eye of a storm, a mouth or a womb, an atom or a supernova. In a sense, the work is residue: the watercolors are made of dried-up water, and what remains are still, swirling hues. Stone, too, is the residue of compacted time and space—full (quite literally) with life and death, the sediment of what we’ve lived, our footprints and skin cells, our pain and desire. It’s always on-the-go, and it lives longer than any of us can live. We encounter this most ancient fact of the world in these works, while we see the traces of a mind fumbling with its hands. In DIGS, each form makes a dreamlike gesture at becoming an image. Ultimately, we either make sense of the image after processing the form, or we remain in the dream of time/space before giving language to matter—dwelling in the slowness of imagining, with the density of stone, awash in the archaeological fragments of our own psyches.

Simone Kearney (b. Dublin, Ireland) lives and works in Brooklyn. Some exhibitions include Undercurrent Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Putty’s Coronation, Brooklyn, NY; Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY; Olympia Gallery, New York, NY; Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, CA; Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY. She has been artist in residence at Shandaken: Storm King, Uillinn: West Corks Arts Center, Shandaken: Paint School, Shandaken: Governor’s Island, Lighthouse Works, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, among others. She is a NYFA grant recipient and is the author of Dim, Dahlia, Violet, Stone, (ITI Press, 2024), DAYS, (Belladonna Press, 2021), and My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She teaches at Parsons School for Design and Rutgers University.