Rebecca Appleby's sculptural 'Stela' series is a poetic look at the circle of life and death

From dust to dust, the matter that makes up our built environment is excavated from the earth, only to return to it eventually. Demolition, abandonment, neglect, confronting the vagaries of time and the constant search for the new—while architecture often purports to be built for eternity, it will eventually disintegrate or be discarded. What then, do we make of the liminal space between complete disintegration and abandon? Do we reuse deteriorating material or let it return to where it came from? This process, of crumbling matter, of ruination and decay fascinates UK-based artist and ceramicist Rebecca Appleby.

In Stela (2022 - ), an ongoing series of sculptures, Appleby showcases the fragments of built matter—preserved from demolition sites—in organic and raw sculptural designs. Appleby explores ceramic techniques and processes to bring out the degraded quality of these discarded objects, leaving them intact and covering areas with clay. Clay, as she believes, holds: memories, stories and the many lives of the once-standing built structure. The name for the series, Stela, derives from wooden or stone slabs used in ancient Greece and Rome. These slabs were used for many purposes, often as memorials or funerary notices. The sculptures are universal as much as personal for Appleby, as she notes on her website, "These sculptures represent an autobiographical series of stela that commemorate and mark important personal events and experiences."

For Appleby, the cycle of genesis, being and eventual decay (represented by the building fragments she uses) mirrors the life cycle of humans. Like humans, buildings are sites that hold memories and even once they are demolished, these scars, dints, the graffiti-tagged walls relay these stories back to the keen observer. "This process [of creation and destruction] reflects the human condition and life cycle. As buildings serve as vessels for activity, our own lives are similarly contained within a finite span," she tells STIR. "We, too, carry the weight of memory, history and experience and like structures, our bodies break down over time, eventually returning to the earth in fragments. Yet, even in this disintegration, traces of who we were—our spirit, our essence—persist. Like the recycled remnants of demolished buildings, parts of us remain, influencing future generations and ideas."

For the sculpture art pieces, hewn from building fragments and clay, the ceramic artist takes fragments from a demolition site or one marked for redevelopment, covering it in clay in places and then sculpting this, sanding and chiselling till a desirable shape is achieved. For some of the recent ceramic artworks in the series, the sculpture artist has even treated the pieces with layered organic patinas created using coloured clays, engobes and waxes giving them an otherworldly sheen, hoping to bring the quality of ruin but also regeneration. "I am particularly interested in what happens when a structure is altered, broken, destroyed or reimagined. Visually I think these ruins/fragments have a conceptual and aesthetic beauty. I think the disfiguration and patina of age tells a beautiful story and suggests a journey that is experienced throughout life," as she mentions on her website.

The series, poignant in how it looks at circularity and ruin after the life of a building is over, is also inspired in part by the philosophies of Japanese author Masaru Emoto's Experiments on Water. Through his research, Emoto revealed how water collects information relayed to it and is conscious of feelings and thoughts. It is in the same way that Appleby conceives of her ceramic artwork.

Ruins remind us that time moves on. That human hubris is nothing in the face of natural forces and the relentless march of time. Appleby simply takes this notion and provides a more optimistic look at the idea of decay. The sculptures not only remind us that ruin is inevitable but also that we are of this earth and that we are filled with experiences, memories, relationships and stories. It asks to look again at what is discarded in new, symbolic ways.