This new exhibition by Matthew McVeigh titled Songs in the Cutsbrings together a series of mixed media works that examine the entangled histories of surveying, mapping, and mining in Western Australia. The works mobilise the language of cartography and topographic abstraction, translating the scars of extraction into layered visual fields. Each work becomes a site where geological strata, aerial surveys, and mining incursions are rendered not merely as technical documents, but as cultural inscriptions that cut through Country.‍The recurring motif of the “cut” operates on multiple registers: as a physical incision into the earth, a bureaucratic delineation of territory, and a cultural rupture that severs ancestral songlines. Yet within these painterly translations, the cuts also reverberate with counter-narratives, songs carried across deep time that resist erasure. Lines undulate like soundwaves, ochres bleed into survey grids, and mining pits become reimagined as apertures through which memory and loss echo.‍By juxtaposing schematic precision with gestural fluidity, this exhibition underscores the paradox of modern surveying: a technology of control that nonetheless cannot contain the immensity of Country’s rhythms. The paintings and other works situate themselves between the archive and the landscape. They both re-inscribing colonial maps with an aesthetic of resistance and also re-sound the silenced songs embedded within the earth.