Rebecca Ackroyd

Rebecca Ackroyd
28.09.2017 - 05.11.2017

For her solo exhibition, The Root, Rebecca Ackroyd produces a sculptural installation exploring the feeling of urban space and the architecture of the body. Ackroyd’s practice involves digging down into existing objects and memories and reconfiguring them in to something new. Responding directly to specific architectural features, her works in Jesmonite, wax, carpet, metal and felt dramatically inhabit rooms. Domestic and industrial object such as window shutters, pipes and vents often form starting points. These are cast, welded and their surfaces collaged; the objects pushed towards an evocation of bodily structures such as limbs, rib-cages and heads. Ackroyd also makes dynamic drawings in pastel on paper that feature a female protagonist and act as windows out of an installation into an alternative dream-space. Her work offers a very personal imaginary landscape, one that moves through shifting scales and moods, from the recognisable and bold to the subtle and intimate.

Rebecca Ackroyd (b. 1987, Cheltenham, UK) lives and works in London. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2015 after completing her BA in Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art in 2010. Ackroyd has presented solo exhibitions at OUTPOST, Norwich (2017) and in London at Hunter/Whitfield (2015), Kinman Gallery (2014) and Marsden Woo Gallery (2013). Recent group exhibitions in 2015-7 include: These Rotten Words, Chapter, Cardiff (2017); Walled Gardens in an Insane Eden, Z2O Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome; Modest Villa Immense Versailles (co-curator), Kinman Gallery, London; At Home Salon: Double Acts, Marcelle Joseph Projects, Ascot; Bloody Life, Herald St, London; All Over, Studio Leigh, London; Is it heavy or is it light?, Assembly Point, London; With institutions like these, Averard Hotel, London; Opals, Galerie Opdahl, Stavanger, Norway; Royal Academy Schools Degree Show, London; Works in Residence, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London. In 2013, her work was included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries (ICA, London and Spike Island, Bristol)