Rebecca Appleby: A Mapper of Life and Death 2021
Essay written by Dr Ashley Thorpe
We currently live in the most cartographically rich culture in history, since maps have penetrated the everyday material world in an unprecedented manner. Ubiquitous mobile mapping, due to the explosion of digital devices and practices and the proliferation of cartographic interfaces and imageries, has profoundly changed the profile of cartography within society. Today, there is no need to amplify the black noise of cartographic objects. Maps are not peripheral: They are everywhere. However, at the same time, this growing ubiquity is placing maps in the background: Both digital and nondigital maps back away into unseen worlds, they are practiced unconsciously or relate to un-structured audiences.
Maps document and interpret. They are visual artifacts produced by the history of travel, trade, colonialism, imperialism, science, technology, wealth, and power. Today, we access maps all the time: instantaneously on our phones, via the Satnavs in our cars, as we make our way around unfamiliar cities, transportation networks, or even enter a shopping centre or department store. Interestingly, the oldest extant portable map was made from clay. Found in what is now Southern Iraq, a clay tablet, probably made around the 6th century BC, bears a map of the Babylonian world in the shape of a disc surrounded by a ring of water labelled the ‘Bitter River’. Within the disc of land sits the city of Babylon, the Euphrates river, significant mountains, swamps, and the important Akkadian city of Susa. As Babylon was evidently the familiar homeland of the cartographer, Babylonia was positioned at the centre of the map, with other territories situated towards, or signalled as beyond, its peripheries. In this sense, maps are ideological and political documents as much as an objective record of geography. For instance, Ancient Greeks and Romans placed the Mediterranean at the centre of their maps, and it is of no coincidence that the contemporary world map (the Mercator projection) – a product of imperial and colonial missions from the fifteenth century onwards – places Western Europe at the centre. In contrast, the AuthaGraph World Map (dubbed “the world’s most accurate map”), produced by the Japanese architect and artist Hajime Narukawa in 2016, situates the islands of Japan at the centre of the world. Maps are not just documents of the world; they articulate identity, that is, a specific world view.
Appleby’s sculptures do not bear a conscious visual relationship to maps, but I find that they operate at a similar conceptual level. If maps are documents of experience, a means of interpreting the world from a specific point of view, even ideological and political tools, we might come to view Appleby’s sculptures as quasi map-objects, or what some in map studies have termed ‘cartefacts’; a mixture of cartography and artefact. As the American cartographer and artist William Rankin has observed, “cartographic authorship has changed dramatically […], since scholarship, design, and craft are now increasingly mingled. Mapping is no longer a specialist pursuit anxious about its scientific credentials; it is instead a powerful form of everyday communication”. This mingling of scholarship, design, and craft, offers an invitation to situate Appleby’s ‘cartefacts’ as sculptures that span across time, unify the past with the present, and the personal with the universal. She utilises the material of the oldest extant map – clay – to offer insights into the changing states of the contemporary world.
Urban Palimpsest (2016) was Appleby’s first mature series of work. A palimpsest is a manuscript or document where the original writing has been erased at least once only to be replaced with new writing. Like maps, palimpsests are products of erasure and refinement, revision and correction, as layers of writing accumulate into something new that resonates in a particular way with the contemporary. Indeed, urban environments – our towns and cities – are themselves palimpsests; buildings are continually repurposed from industrial to residential use, whilst entire streets or districts are redeveloped. Appleby’s Urban Palimpsest sculptures are monuments to urban renewal and regeneration, the ever-evolving geographies of our towns. Inspired by the industrial architecture of her native Leeds – from the underpass to the derelict factory – as well as 1950s Brutalism, these works stand as Appleby’s personal response to walks around her city. The sculptures stand as a kind of retrospective mapping, not in the literal sense of an atlas or survey, but of responses to the ever-changing urban landscape. They document personal observations of the impact of urban planning, gentrification, and decay. The multiple layers of writing in ceramic pencil, glaze, and slip, might suggest graffiti, but the layers of inscription also capture the constant mutation that constitutes the places in which we live.
As a consequence, the Urban Palimpsest series stress the importance of mapping, not as an objective documentary exercise, but as a method for communicating the interior experiences of an individual journey to a public audience. As the cultural geographer Bernard Stiegler has observed, through maps:
The memory of the human entity is essentially exteriorised, materialised and spatialised. It is spatially, materially and technically projected into what is constituted as a common space and time, projected if not out of time then at least beyond its own original temporality and in a certain way put into reserve in space, enabling it to become at once the memory of the individual and of the group.
In other words, in Urban Palimpsest, Appleby’s own memories of journeying around Leeds are “exteriorised, materialised and spatialised” by the creation of her sculptures. The resulting work takes her experiences out of the past and enables new audiences to access them in the contemporary, perhaps even the future. Thus, each sculpture is placed, “if not out of time then at least beyond its own original temporality”. Once exhibited, Appleby’s personal experience becomes “at once the memory of the individual and of the group”, as her singular journeys around Leeds are rearticulated in sculpture, and then interpreted by a wider public. Of course, these abstract sculptures do not replicate the actual experience of walking around Leeds any more than a world map replicates the experience of crossing an ocean. Nevertheless, like maps, Appleby’s Urban Palimpsest sculptures abstract geography to enable us to understand something of how our towns and cities constantly mutate. They capture urban decline and renewal and express it far beyond the individual time and space of their creation. These are distinctive, intelligent, and formally innovative sculptures.
In subsequent bodies of work, Appleby moved to the edges of our urban environments to explore how they intersect with the natural landscape. The A Fractured Harmony (2018) series consisted of a number of large enclosed forms, many with steel extrusions. These extrusions activate the empty space surrounding the sculpture into the composition, offering a transparent compositional counterpoint to the concealed space suspended within the clay body. This conceit exhibits the compositional harmony alluded to in the series title, even as the utilisation of two materials – clay as redolent of the earth, and steel as a metaphor for industry and architecture – suggest imbalance. Indeed, the curved bases of many of the sculptures gives them a precarious relationship with surfaces; their tendency to rock evincing a further sense of unease. Whilst the larger pieces appear deceptively light and airy, the smaller pieces have a weightiness that imbues in them an expressive power beyond their diminutive size. Some of the smaller works seem to be anthropomorphic, loosely resembling frogs or snails, whilst others appear more akin to rocks and pebbles. In all cases, the finely crafted lines recall the shape-focused Brutalist influence found in the Urban Palimpsest series. Yet, here, abstraction has a disquieting effect: imagery inspired by the natural world is smoothed and shaped by lines derived from the aesthetics of modernist architecture. Flat colour draws attention to the linearity of the composition; planes become the most significant compositional facet of each piece. As a result, these works capture the ambivalent – both appreciative and exploitative – relationship humans have with their natural world.
If the A Fractured Harmony series spanned across the urban/rural divide, the Inner Order series (2019) focused solely on the organic. The airiness of the larger works from the A Fractured Harmony series wererevisited, but greater emphasis was placed upon the porousness between interior and exterior space. Initially inspired by the growth of crystals underground, Appleby subsequently realised that the pieces were more autobiographical, since “the concept of formation and growth resonates on many personal levels.” Whilst the works do not allude to specific personal circumstances in their own right, they nevertheless suggest a tension that many of us recognise in our lives. The mathematical precision of the holes, shapes, and planes, communicate the human desire to plan, create order, and direct our lives down distinct pathways. The organic boulder-like forms, however, suggest nature, an entity that has its own force, follows its own rules, and acts independently of human will. The surface is thus the point at which these two forces collide: the organic and schematic are oppositional, yet by being held in tension within the sculpture, they become co-dependent. Navigating this tension, the sculptures seem to imply, is a basic human instinct, an ‘inner order’.
In many ways, the Inner Order series facilitated a conceptual transition in Appleby’s practice, a means for her to realise her own biography was a viable and vital resource for new work. As she confessed, “following the birth of my first child I was critically ill with sepsis then diagnosed with cancer. This experience changed everything. I was confronted with life and death instantaneously and life was never to be the same.” In her subsequent series of work, Grace (2020), Appleby confronted the dualities of life and death head on. The sculptures of Grace are, despite their title, uncompromising, and certainly less polite than previous bodies of work. Appleby created a series of gnarled shapes that twist and turn through space like alien creatures. Claw-like growths protrude from their bodies, almost like limbs on the rotting corpse of an animal. Wires suggest awkward stitching; meshes imply the application of medical gauzes. These sculptures could almost be biopsies, tumour extractions, or the removal of sections of damaged organ. Whilst their form seems to suggest death, it does not follow that they communicate fatality. If anything, these sculptures assert the death of disease, a triumph over adversity, and the elimination of malignancy. The technically accomplished display of painterly glazes and tactile textures that grow, moss-like, over the surface of each work is self-evidently celebratory and triumphal. These sculptures stare death straight in the face, but they do so to represent, and elicit in us, a new appreciation for life. As we live through the global Covid-19 pandemic, such sentiments seem more pertinent than ever, and will likely linger in our consciousness for many years to come.
A renewed appreciation for life can be found in her most recent series of work, Infrastructure (2021). If Grace explored the triumph over death, Infrastructure celebrates what keeps the compartmental parts of our bodies together, even if they appear as lifeless relics. Some of the sculptures look like abstractions of organs, skeletal remains, or porous membranes placed under a microscope. They unite the mathematic patterning of the Inner Order series with the bodily interiority of the Grace sculptures. Yet, if the Grace sculptures used images of death to conjure life, Infrastructure uses images of life to represent mortality. Each Infrastructure piece is compositionally balanced and very consciously resolved. As such, these are structures free from damage or disease. However, their dark colours turn them into relics, artefacts of life that might almost have been preserved in formaldehyde. In 2021, these works have a very particular resonance. Our bodies, our communities, even our entire way of constructing society, have been tested by a global pandemic. The structures of globalisation that brought exciting new connections to our world suddenly became our enemy, a conduit for disease and death. Infrastructure reminds us that even the apparently healthiest of structures are vulnerable. Nothing is infinite: life and death are but two sides of the same coin.
In the exceptional 2019 exhibition The Journey of Things, shown at The Hepworth in Wakefield and the Sainsbury’s Centre for Visual Art in Norwich in 2019, the ceramic artist Dame Magdalene Odundo showed some fifty examples of her own work alongside a vast array of paintings, sculptures, masks and other objects from around the globe. The Journey of Things was thus partly about the journey of objects, how they travel, and upon arrival in a new context, take on new meanings. As Odundo herself stated in the exhibition catalogue, this means that:
Making is a journey of collecting, piecing together the collected or recorded memories. Each of the things we collect becomes an aide mémoire, leading to an idea that might be manifested in the work we make.
This statement by Odundo is equally applicable to Appleby. All of Appleby’s sculptures are documents of journeys; the literal journey around a city, but also the existential journey of a battle against acute illness. Whilst each sculpture may have a particular and personal resonance for the artist, each of them embarks upon a new journey when they are exhibited in a gallery or purchased by a collector. Appleby’s personal experience is mapped into sculpture, but experiences are made anew once they are released into the world.
Appleby’s sculptural vocabulary emerges from the rich tapestry of twentieth century British studio ceramics. Her work draws formal inspiration from organic abstractionists such as Gordon Baldwin, Gillian Lowndes, and (the Polish artist based in London) Aneta Regel. Appleby’s own contribution to this tradition is to harness these languages to communicate contemporary experience, from the transience of our towns and cities, to the fleetingness of our own lives, and the unseen interior worlds of our bodies. Like maps, Appleby’s sculptures are conduits for the communication of experience, generously proffered as a gift for unknown future audiences.