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Rachel Apelt comes from a big family and a creative family, where her mother was not only the provider of a rich domestic life, but also the director and stage manager, sounding board and primary audience for eagerly growing voices. Mothers as feeders of minds as well as bodies—of course! When Apelt’s mother died, many years ago now, her art practice was also wounded—the figure, once central to Apelt’s practice, became absent and eventually artmaking ceased altogether, (contradicting that rather persistent cliché that artmaking is fuelled by suffering and alienation). Luminescence, Apelt’s first solo exhibition in nine years, is then a recovery, not or not only from grief and loss but, perhaps more importantly, a recovery of Apelt’s conversation with her mother, that rich imaginative internal realm and protected private world of home, where the real, the imaginary and the symbolic are often felt as seamlessly interconnected. However, the exhibition does not attempt to access that realm via ‘child’s eyes’ or even a nostalgic mature reflection. Rather Apelt uses it as a place and point of departure for gazing at her life now—her contemporary audience, existing intimacies, and the experience of female friendship.
The primary works in the exhibition are a series of portrait paintings, predominantly close-hand facial views of mature age women. In a deliberate echo of the (traditionally female) domestic realm, Apelt has treated the canvas as the fabric that it is, cutting, sewing, and stitching it together. Leaving seams evident and threads hanging, the paintings are literally pieced together as compositions of off-cuts. Though playful in feel, this common ground powerfully ‘socialises’ the works, expressing a sense of relationships, social circles and ways in which (particularly