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In her exhibition Rite of Passage Rachel Apelt employs a number of aesthetic and structural strategies in order to create a feminist/artistic space and experience. I will attempt to outline these strategies punctuating them with quotes from Girlie's Story, the poetic narrative which accompanied the paintings.
History began with the Keeper But this isn't his story, it is mine.
The primary strategy at work in the exhibition is that of mythologisation. The paintings depict a narrative of self-realisation. Girlie, an archetype of the passive oppressed woman, realises her servitude and conquers the Keeper, a personified archetype of patriarchy. The strategy of mythologisation finds its artistic antecedents in William Blake. Through his lithography and poetry Blake attacked the oppressive morality of organised religion and class structure in late eighteen century England by re-creating the myths of creation , sexual maturation and expression: notions of innocence and experience
Apelt 's myth of Girlie and the Keeper describes a feminist experience which goes beyond biography, history and the individual, allowing imagery of figuration and portraiture to escape from a modernist aesthetic fetish and a bourgeois humanism. Time is feminised. Mythic time, lying outside history, achieves a sustained sense of presence,while the linear time of the narrative is generative, focussing upon a future of birth rather than the finite moment of death.
Impotent drifting beached me in other nonspaces, and from these vantage points I could sense the invisible-other entities who fell into such gaps and nonspaces, and outside history.
'Girlie ' is not any one woman nor every women but an aspect of the female as defined by patriarchy. Thus her mythological personification and final annihilation is a core experience essential to both