Happening across Sheffield’s gallery GLOAM and Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, Abi Charlesworth’s abstracted archaeological sites draw from a body of research constantly ‘changing and responding to the environment it finds itself within’. I come to find these sedimentary layers myself, unfolding a personal narrative through steel, ceramic, jesmonite, pewter and sand.

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GLOAM - sitting on Sheffield’s central Arundel Street, inconspicuous besides the liveliness of its neighbouring pub - inherits a fragment of Northern industry, of England’s steely heritage. A history once thriving in metalwork, to then fade and collapse; the steelworks, I note on arrival into the city, are largely no longer in use. Collapsing, for a finite time though; in the last few years such spaces have began to be injected with activity, the creatives here propelling Sheffield into a home for makers. Metal and sculpture practices in particular are re-emerging here. to rest among the blades, the new solo show by Abi Charlesworth, occurring in GLOAM at the time of writing this, adds to this growth of creativity. Unfolding like an archaeological excavation - visually, and psychologically too the longer I sit with the work - the show seamlessly resonates with the city’s industrial past, evoking something weldable and changing. Molten matter to a concrete entity, and back, sometimes.

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Abi’s show is in tone, a quiet one - or rather shadowy, somewhat sombre. A reset. I consider how memory operates, taking snapshots of a potent moment or feeling, an essence of an occurrence, rather than a direct account, which keeps reworking and remoulding, like each work in the show. Such objects - stripped and cast outlines of carcasses, of bodies passed - emerge strewn out as exoskeletons; fallen, abandoned, exposed, for too long unnoticed I wonder. The choice to cast real objects bolsters Abi’s position as an evolving sculptor, casting coming to the fore as a transformative act which comes with unpredictability, with a breaking open [of the mould, of a form], of a revealing of marks in the cast [from her touch]. Time and the happenings in that time etched into a concretised surface. Losing the original life of the cast to present a remembrance, like the act of grief; each work a representation of a life passed.

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I encounter deep poeticism with the exoskeletons here, and notice myself feeling smaller in posture and quieter in step upon entering, more considered in my pace and movement. Perhaps due to the install of the show, with a low ceiling and minimal lighting casting shadows across charcoal-flecked walls, bearing resemblance to a chasm or bodily ravine. This install feels intentional, tended to for quite some time. Indeed, I learn from the show’s curator Thomas Griffiths that Abi and GLOAM have discussed and worked on this show for over a year, a strong working partnership established. A landscape of grey-scale tones meets the eye, replete with rubble, casts made from jesmonite with black pigments and chain links, and a series of metal fragments slicing through the space from walls to floor. Meshed surfaces referencing scaffolding - for protection against unknowns, against the possibility of [more] trauma. Mesh encasing and holding the body’s experiences in. Asking, how to care for the self, how to embody pain and subsequent processing? Mesh as the layering of memories and feeling, as fissures in land and human experience, with slippages between the wiring, between fact and fiction. How we recall things, how memories undo themselves. The sense of touch is inherent throughout the work, the desire to know external things and ourselves better. To understand sensorially, viscerally, painfully close.

 

Fragments sitting like low-hanging clouds. Like omens. The metal shelving frames, acting as structural supports to other casted objects, as well as holding up their own objected abjectness, feel weighted and directional. Cascading down to the rubble, I follow their barbed outlines to espy silver clawed shapes and unidentified ceramic fragments upon and below them. Unknowns, unnamed. They unnerve me with the uncertainty and heaviness they seem to carry. Gnarled and reaching out almost, for someone or something to clasp, to hold; maybe, wishing to be held by, embraced.

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The accompanying exhibition text remarks on ‘a depression’ - the etymology of depression, to press down, feels intrinsic here - such fossilised forms ‘displayed as an open wound to a dissection of grief’. These are the petrified remains of an encounter that shocks or sticks - this image of a molten, free-flowing form encountering something cold and abrasive returns. Concretised, laying out its treatment and trauma entailed. Debris of dystopia, of (heart)ache, of unexpected loss. Loss - be that one of permanence or of a period with an end in sight, with a gradual unsticking. This is a landscape forged and with potential to evolve or recede, sculpted with attentiveness and led by genuine emotion, in which objects and visitor/witness to trauma are displaced, negotiating what it is face something, to deteriorate or alter state; to possibly grow and shed past selves through a process of time, of acknowledging, of reconfiguring. One might express this encounter as a passage to healing.

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I read the room’s charcoal notations in no particular order, constantly looking here to there; I spin on my axis and dip low at points to be on a level with each aspect; to come close. To see, to listen. Rumbling above and through this devised cavern, oscillating in pitch and intensity, is a sound as though a nearby gale. Bellowing and beckoning, winds appear to hit against GLOAM’s rafters. I am for a moment removed from this space; I could be in an abandoned barn, somewhere ramshackle, or on an empty field with buffeting currents, urging to be let in. Carrying the rhythms of an emptiness, of a geography left bare. I learn it is in fact a sound piece installed subtly - satisfyingly, I can’t spot the sound’s source - reverberating outwards a field recording made by Charlesworth from a trip to Galway’s coastline. One hears intermittently the captured traces of a windswept vastness, when no-one but Abi was around. The sound of wind over an empty lot; of movement through an- almost stillness. This is the echo of life through perceived absence. The dwindling remains of lightness over a static, forgotten place. A burial zone attempted to engage with as the grounds of laying things bare, of being [alive]. This is a show that asks ‘what traces do we leave behind… and on each other’? I posit more questions; what traces do those of us still here carry into spaces once abandoned, lacking in presence; how do we continue to be in absence; what does ‘presence’ look like? Feel like? In a time of destabilising climate and civility, how to re-connect with Earth and to one another?

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As I lower myself to the ground, I note small glowing lamps, casting throughout this somewhat oppressive chasm moments of warmth, but also causes for more shadows across the ruin. Light here feels important, Charlesworth utilising light as a shadow object itself - intangible, a spirit-like form - as well as a matter conjuring more darkness in corners it can’t reach. Light as the hovering place between life and death, between understanding/grieving/re-understanding. As the luminescent echo of a life before and one existing in the present moment, as a projection into the future tense of what feelings may come or dissolve, over and over again. Shedding itself across hidden treasures among the rubble, eluding to a softness, to connectivity between people, and people and places. To finding and remembering. An ascension of light; of viewpoint.

 

And beneath the lamps - little specks of light reflected back. Coins or symbols, arrowheads or runes - how to read such discoveries? - part-hidden in the fractured earthenware, stacks of treasures half-glimpsed. Without slowing, without staying with the loss/truth/slowly emerging pain, one might miss these small beacons. Of encouragement? Could this be an allegory for hope? Reliquaries, palimpsests. Excavating back to reveal further questioning and truths. Constant reconciliations. Small rosetta stones expressing loss, but offering themselves up to be considered. To be sat with and maybe, as the gales of loss and hesitation subside, be renewed with vigour and purpose, and a new currency - of accepting and offering, of embracing what it is to subside, to be. Situated amongst the blades - sharp, inconsistent, to one day return - but moving beyond them too.

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The second iteration of the artist’s expansive body of work continues to grow, this time in Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. Wirksworth, known for its quarries - sites of working away at something - and warmer earthen palette, feels fitting for the latter part of this dual-sited exhibition. The install itself unfolds in a space much brighter, Haarlem Artspace boasting open windows and a higher ceiling. There is less grano-dust (the rubble Abi shapes her landscape with) spread throughout, but rather swept further back into smaller piles, with room to move more easily, assuredly. To feel an elevation.

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Again this aspect of light - light as a lift visually and emotionally, carrying and alleviating weight. Illuminating. No longer just charred impressions and clouded screens, but another cartography of feeling, a shift in what the gallery sits as, how one can negotiate alternative sites with a recourse in feeling and outlook. This recall to continuous unearthing and discovering, resonances of a person before and one to come, of learning through materials. Rocks warming from black to grey to cream and red, alluding to molten. In this second show the same forms are cast in red-oxide, emitting a gentle glow, seemingly opening themselves up. The cast chain links suspended on the wall seem to have lessened in length too, beginning to unburden themselves. Evidence of a snapping - physically, emotionally. A duality in such action, links being broken at the expense of loss, but also embodying a freeing motion.

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Further, the sound in this iteration undergoes a shift. Recordings unfurl stretched out and manipulated, to take on the act of slowing down and giving more attention to where one is situated - I find my mind doesn’t wander afield as much in this show, perhaps with some unease still but more assertive, anchored. Noise rips through the room at points, pulsating - raging in intensity at its peak - as though a pulse, a coursing through bodies’ channels and landscape’s gulleys and cracks. An eruption? A cacophony of disorder, or re-ordering? I’m sitting with the surges and subsidences of noise, of paths taken, of living. Reckoning with what we meet in this next round. A [material] reckoning revealing what it is to be human. Landscapes as escape and explanation, that un-burdens the artist/viewer/witness, speaking to the body’s limited capacity to hold.

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Herein are two shows that consider pain, healing, process, and matter, from which something is made anew. Traversing out of the cavern, across the streets to the moors. Into new sites of action, new blades - opening up to softer surfaces, gentler winds - this time, truly, laid to rest.

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words by Lu Rose Cunningham