“… Since 1998, McNab has been working with people suffering from the long-term effects of chemical poisoning; her paintings are based on photographs of them and their home environments. Each is accompanied by a short, simply worded text describing the subject’s predicament … In Illness as Metaphor (1978), Susan Sontag insists that true insights into illness can only be won by resisting metaphoric thinking, but she goes on to admit that ‘the lurid metaphors with which (illness) has been landscaped’ inevitably mold our perception of it. McNab strives to represent spaces fraught with invisible dangers, and minds battling fear and isolation, without traducing her subjects’ dignity and privacy. Given the task of rendering visible that which cannot be seen, metaphor becomes an indispensable tool, and thus her paintings offer a visual articulation of Sontag’s dilemma … a knife-edge balancing act between an objective and subjective register, reinforcing the play of opposites—visibility and invisibility, objectivity and subjectivity, expression and concealment—that shapes the artist’s overall project.”