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Cacophony opened on International Women's Day and, appropriately, the work is about women and women 's experience. Through subtle interplay of colour and images, Apelt's exhibition challenges the absoluteness of a Nature/Culture dichotomy and would seem to stake a claim for relativity, in Nature at least. Her works present a Woman/Nature link which presses the viewer to a consideration of subtleties which convenient and glib classifications allow us to overlook.
A cacophony is discordant sound. At first glance Apelt 's work fulfills that expectation: oranges and purples scream disharmony. The surface, the physical world, is filled with dissonance: disparate images of woman competing, vying for control.
But after the initial impression settles, a gentler range of colours emerges: soft blue-greens and hazy lilacs suggest a spiritual level which is the province of women – as yet, in these works, unexplored, but offering a potential harmony.
The works in Cacophony hover between the physical and spiritual. Yet a unity of concept emerges from the them, overreaching the mixing of media. This conceptual unity is spelt out for us in Apelt's catalogue: "a rites of passage cycle concerning liberation from internalized oppression. Its protagonist is the girl .. ."
The artist creates a narrative unity, a mythology which links the images one by one in a 'quest': a young woman's search for her own voice among so many others intent on shaping and controlling her.
Sharp Edge occurs mid-cycle. Oil on canvas, it was an astute choice for the catalogue cover for it epitomises the exhibition 's themes and concerns. In it, the girl, the rites-of-passage subject, has reached her most vulnerable point. She is naked rather than nude, stripped and unprotected. The