#131 Rebecca Ackroyd, House Fire
24 March - 16 April
Rebecca Ackroyd was born in Cheltenham in 1987 and studied at the Royal Academy. Recent solo exhibitions include Hunter/Whitfield (2015) and Kinman Gallery (2014). Recent group exhibitions include These Rotten Words, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff; Walled Gardens in an Insane Eden, 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; 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).
In the morning when I wake up I forget that none of it really happened and I lie for a while trying to piece together the fragments. It feels like I lost something. Like the ache of heartbreak the shadow of the memory slumps heavily in my chest until it gradually takes shape and comes into focus. I begin to remember what happened; the unrelenting heat from the black, hard ground beneath my feet and how it burned through the soles of my shoes, how the scorched, thick air itched my bare skin with the weight of an invisible blanket. I remember the helicopter ride that circled around the vast, gaping mouth as it softly and slowly spat and hissed its hellish, red, hot utterances of death. The beautiful and measured female pilot who spoke to me through a headset, and made me feel like I was part of something important, a mission of some sort. Of knowing what no one else seemed to know, that it was all about to end, and my sense of overwhelming loss, of heartbreak for life and its inevitable end, I wondered why everyone was so calm. I remember the unshakable sadness at thinking I’ll never have sex again, or that the man I love I couldn’t reach to say good bye and I love you one last time. Through this darkness at night the memory is formed of an experience I’ve never had, but that nevertheless leaves the residual, lingering sense that it was real, that it counts.
A conversation between Nell Croose Myhill and Rebecca Ackroyd, OUTPOST Gallery, 20th March 2017
Nell Croose Myhill: I attended a talk where you spoke about wanting to approach making work with the attitude you had as a teenager, with freedom and honesty, and risk. How did you approach this new body of work?
Rebecca Ackroyd: Well, since the talk in June, I didn’t make any work for a few months afterwards. I really wanted to think about what I wanted my work to be doing, and what the impetus behind it is, I feel as though a lot of anger and frustration and despair from well, I guess since June.
The works in the show have a much more direct reference to my personal history and where I come from. There’s a piece that’s a bit like my parents house, so it has these inlets for windows, which is where we used to sit and smoke when we were teenagers, all the sculptures felt like they were things I needed to make. Like the Ironside - which is the stuffed toy version of my Mum’s maiden name - I just really need to make that, and have it. And none of it was really about making sculpture, it was just to make these objects.
NCM: And what happens when they become objects?
RA: I think I just wanted to turn these memories into substance. But they are still very small and vulnerable. Everything about this show feels quite exposed, or quite exposing. For me, it feels a lot more nervous than anything else I’ve done. Like the work feels nervous, and I feel nervous!
NCM: Wow, OK, because to me it doesn’t seem tentative.
RA: I wanted to have a few certainties, like the carpet. I always knew there would be a carpet. I really like the inherent masculinity in pub culture. I’ve worked in pubs a lot and I was thinking about how they become a haven for people to go to drink, and to escape their home life. Or can be. The carpet is titled ‘the wife’. I wanted it to be like a landscape or a world for the objects to emerge out of, like the pieces are inhabiting a reality.
NCM: Can we talk about how you name your work - the carpet is called the wife - giving them characteristics or personifying them somehow?
RA: The large print with the furry hands is called ‘We have your children’. I saw it at a Women’s March, as part of a bigger placard. I wanted the image to consider the fear of the other, or the unknown. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as a woman. Having young nieces, I’ve heard them say already “I can’t do that I’m a girl”, at the age of 5, because they’ve heard someone else say it, and it infuriates me that we grow up with this sense of “knowing your place”. I think with the recent election of Trump and having listened to that disgusting recording of him talking about grabbing women “by the pussy” I thought a lot about how this kind of language normalises the undermining and objectification of women. And the feeling of not being able to do things. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about whilst making the work. Which is why I made the Ironside, and why there is a Fairy Tower made out of metal. All the sculptures are almost like images of, or it felt like making a memory of something, rather than a replica of anything. It’s an image of a thought.
Photo credit: Andy Crouch