16 November 1937 2.30pm

Pailthorpe's paintings, on the whole, are more sedate and less tormented than Mednikoff's. Her works main feature shows the latent desire to regress into the mother's womb and/or to fulfil the impossible wish to bear a child, through themes and images of protection and feeding - which obviously imply the reverse, turning her works into stages on which a drama is enacted, haunted by various threats, like weakness, fragility, starvation, fears, the father's shadow or the mother's jealousy. Here, foetus-like cephalopods find protection in the hollow of the mother's armpit, while still clinging to the eggs they come from - birth is definitely a trauma, it says. One has to realize, too, that even with such explanation, the picture remains a challenge to the eye and to the mind. The title is indicative of the strict scientific quality of the recordings of the mind's secret life, which Pailthorpe and Mednikoff meticulously observed.

M.R.