Heap

Heap, 2025

Stoneware toasted ceramic tiles, tin oxide, aluminium castor wheels, cement-based grout, plywood, softwood timber.

Heap is a site-specific sculpture inhumed in ceramic tiles that preserve surface indentations cast from a familial headstone at Burngreave Cemetery belonging to the artist’s antecedent: surname Heap. The name of the structure becomes performative—assimilating the surname to burial heap-mounds and archaeological unearthings. In form, the necro-architectural sculpture evidences practices of inversion informed by the earliest uses of casting in ancient death masks and votive reliefs. The tiles are abstractions–figurations of bodily absences–presences observing an infra-thin separation between ‘the ‘mortiferous layer’ of its surface [the cast], from the living context in which we find it [the headstone]: life/death’ (Krauss 1996:77). Heap, therefore, performs a dissection or spatio-temporal cut of site, architecture and body. This procedural dissection may be read within the context of Karen Barad’s agential cut; where matter ‘cuts together/apart as a “holding together” of the disparate itself [...]’ (2012:46). The gridded composition, synonymous to graph paper and space-time nets, allows the loculi-like structure to be performative in its presence: at once material–immaterial, swaying between flat–volumetric, presenting a continuum of spacetimematterings. Heap builds on Sharples’ companion pieces Soft Shell (2023) and Gurney (2023), which methodologically attend to ‘agencies that interconnect substance, flesh and place’ (Alaimo 2018:436).

Shown as part of the exhibition NECROLOGY at Haarlem Artspace, Wirksworth.