Holding a Gap: the Work of Miki Mappin

I walked past Miki Mappin’s work for years without knowing it. With no didactic material or barriers to obstruct the concrete-cast figures, I thought of them more as inhabitants of the lobby when I started photographing them for a research project.¹ Unlike the statues I’m used to seeing in the semi-public spaces of museums and galleries, no wooden box, iron bar, or bored security guard imposed a separation between myself and the figures in the large lobby. I could crouch and peer into their eyes and feel the surface of the concrete. I felt like the statues created a shared space, rather than an imposed distance.

The cadre of nine concrete figures is an unassuming bunch, spread out casually across the benches and built-in planters of the lobby, but they add to the surreal quality of the building that houses both the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health. Wanting to properly attribute the work, I went into the gallery off of the large lobby and asked for some information on the sculptures. Though it is not part of the MacKenzie Art Gallery collection, I was handed a photocopy of an article from the early 1980s when the building opened and the installation was originally commissioned. I googled her dead name (the only one listed on the article) and was met with a news article detailing Mappin’s activism as well as her diverse body of work, from exhibition design to installation and dance. Later, she told me that she had given the article (from a publication called Western Producer) to the security guards at the T.C. Douglas Building, who have continued to distribute it.

I began to focus on the statues while working on a project about holes, gaps, and voids. I photographed the places where the forms break away from themselves, the spaces that are created by a continuity of material that was made to represent the moments when the body holds itself. As I photographed these voids, I thought a lot about how space is created and demarcated. The lobby of the building created a confusion between inside and outside with its trees and windows, but also between here and elsewhere with its tropical transplants. These statues and these plants were the only residents of an otherwise interstitial space.

I have heard people describe British Modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth as, among other things, a sculptor of air. Hepworth has aligned her perforated works with the sculptural tradition of the pierced form. Four of her sculptures were named using the term “pierced.” This convention can be seen in sculptures from antiquity, where different parts of a figure connect, often through the resting of limbs—an arm drapes from a shoulder and connects with a hip or a thigh. It is in this space (also known as negative space) where Hepworth works, building a container or a passageway. I see these works as demarcations of space rather than simply an attempt at filling it.

I reached out to Mappin about her work not long after I was shown the photocopied article. I was curious about what it was like to have a work be so public and how her thoughts about it had changed over time. When we spoke, many of her recollections were technical. She told me that the casting process is a play between surfaces; some remain and others are discarded. The mold of a person was made and filled and destroyed in the becoming of a figure.

Mappin told me the choice of concrete was important as it proposed a continuity between the material of the sculptures and the material of the building—a metaphor that moves in both directions when considering a government ministry that administrates the beginnings and endings of almost every human life and so many points in between. The public health system is deeply flawed, and it is particularly vulnerable after two years of an ongoing pandemic. I have witnessed its failures—and it has failed to help me on occasion—but I remain thankful for the institution of public healthcare. Without it I would be drowning in medical debt (as so many people around the world are).

Mappin told me a lot about the commission that led to the creation of sculptures in the T.C. Douglas building. She said that the architectural space felt slightly alienating and mildly hostile to inhabitance. At the time, the building had a much more social function: it was where you went to get a health care card and deal with other medicare issues. Before Mappin began work on the project, there was nowhere to sit in the lobby. The benches, which now line the periphery of the lobby, were designed by Mappin as an integral component of the installation to both highlight the collective social function of the building and provide much-needed place to sit.

The theorist Elizabeth Freeman’s main subject in the speculative discipline she has dubbed “erotohistoryography”² is time. Through its hierarchy of life events, she illustrates the shape of time as something inherently porous, leaving gaps and openings that might hold unknown potentials and forgotten or suppressed knowledge. Certain things—certain gestures, certain intimacies—don’t have familiar structures or a widely understood order and significance. Some lives do not follow the predictable structure of birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, childbearing, wealth accumulation, inheritance, retirement, and death. Some lives need other rhythms and points that don’t get the same public acknowledgement that others do.³ Just as time (which can always be understood as a construction of dominance) negates, it also leaves space for dormancy, slippage, and strange connectivity. These gaps in an official timeline become portals to previously unknown possibilities and chance encounters.

A couple of years ago, I was invited by a curator to respond to a prompt about archives and what archives are incapable of holding; it is a question that persists in my practice. I felt parts of that question echoed in Mappin’s documentary Transqueery, Miki Encounters The Neil Richards Collection (2012). Throughout the twenty-minute documentary, Mappin tracks her encounter with a collection of photographs, cultural artifacts, and ephemera that make up the Neil Richards collection, held at the University of Saskatoon. Her camera tracks the layers of security and obfuscation that separate the collection from public space. What she finds is a collection of materials that largely focus on what the collector describes as “crossdressing entertainment.”⁴ It made me reflect on the hyper-performance of drag, something quite different to the subtlety and quietness of both Mappin’s sculptures and her more recent dance work.

The collection’s physical distance from the outside world—the world I live in—matched the distance I felt between the life I live and the performance of drag that made up the majority of the Richards collection. Throughout Mappin’s documentary, she rides her bike, walks down the streets of Saskatoon, and hula hoops in her garden. All of these moments seem to be placed carefully to give a contrasting note of the quotidian to the bombast of nightlife, sequins, and Noxeema Jackson that characterize the public imagination of queerness reflected in this collection.⁵

Part of me is troubled by the fact that the statues’ meaning and significance changed when I found out that they were made by a queer person. They were more intriguing to me, and the possibility of their meaning expanded in my mind. I think I was troubled because of years of theoretical conditioning from my academic training, which proposed a sovereignty between an artwork and the person who made it. I’m sure that there are a host of reasons for such a distinction, but just the fact that these objects hold public space is important to me. These sculptures also present a question about change and the progression of queer identity: as an artist changes, does their work change with them? And how can the plasticity of institutions yield to that change? I change how I understand work all the time, just as I change how I see new people based on new information. I guess I feel a new possibility for being held by these statues now. Before, I was looking at them as a way to think about Barbara Hepworth—they were a kind of surrogate, something I looked through rather than looked at. Now they are something different. Perhaps still a surrogate, but for someone else.

Mappin describes the statues in the T.C. Douglas building as one of her first major artworks. One of the impulses I see in the work—to hold public space in some way—continues throughout her practice. After living in Barcelona for several years and teaching a post-secondary course on the history and design of performance space at the Theatre Institute of Barcelona, Mappin returned to Saskatchewan and worked at the Western Development Museum as an exhibition designer. She was fired from the position after almost a decade of employment when she publicly came out as trans. At the time, discrimination on the basis of gender identity was not included in the Human Rights Code of Saskatchewan, and Mappin made it part of her practice to  advocate for human rights protections in the province.⁶ One of her strategies was to promote trans visibility, and for years she drove a camper van in Saskatoon’s pride march which she painted blue, pink, and white, and dubbed the “Trans* Van.”

These days, most of Mappin’s work happens in public space. She co-leads a company called KSAMB with Kyle Syverson; together, they stage improvised dance works. During our conversation, she described the flow of these performances, how they churn into a rhythm and eventually begin to wind down. As the group dynamic shifts, Mappin says that something happens, something her and her fellow improvisors call “the gap.” As consensus about the dance subsides, there is a valley that opens up, a place where the future of the action is unclear. There is perhaps anxiety here but also a sense of wonder and absurdity as dancers shift and attempt to find the next foothold. It’s a space in which change is not only necessary, but inevitable.

Nic Wilson (he/they) is an artist and writer who was born in the Wolastoqiyik territory now known as Fredericton, NB in 1988. They graduated with a BFA from Mount Allison University, Mi’kmaq territory, in 2012, and an MFA from the University of Regina, Treaty Four Territory, in 2019 where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow. He has shown work across Canada and internationally at Third Space Gallery, Art Mûr, the Remai Modern, Modern Fuel, and Venice International Performance Art Week. Their work often engages time, queer lineage, and the distance between art practice and literature. Their writing has appeared in publications such as BlackFlash Magazine, Headlights Anthology, Peripheral Review, Border Crossings, and PUBLIC. [www.nicwilson.org]

1. In contrast to the relief of Tommy Douglas by Joe Fafard, which hangs on a wall in the lobby.
2. Elizabeth Freeman “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography” Social Text (2005) 23 (3-4 (84-85)): 57–68.
3. The book “You Only Live Twice” explores the a-linear temporality of queer lives in a series of letters between the filmmakers Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom. Throughout the book, they dialogue about their second lives based on two specific queer experiences: Joynt lives a second life as a trans man and Hoolboom as someone who contracted HIV when the disease was considered a guaranteed death-sentence and survived into the time of effective and available medication.
4. What is known to myself and many others as “Drag”.
5. The association between drag and queerness (most often through the lens of white, cisgendered gay men) has only intensified in the years between Mappin’s interaction with the collection—helped in large part by the explosion of RuPaul’s Drag Race as an international media juggernaut.
6. Gender identity was only explicitly stated in an amendment to the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code in December of 2014. Department of Justice, Province Increases Protection Against Discrimination, December 2, 2014.