A blood-red carpet, ghostly body parts infused with lurid blues and pastel pinks that are weighted to heavy wooden furniture, thick red hair that flows down drains, spirals that oscillate with verve, close-ups of eyes that stare, cry, or observe, and vats of red wine and oil: these are some of the elements that occupy the surreal sculptural installations and intense dream-like drawings of Rebecca Ackroyd. With a focus suspended between the corporeal and the psychological, she examines human desires, anxieties, and memories, or, more precisely, those attached to being a woman. Although her work often begins from a place of subjectivity, it is grounded in shared encounters in daily living.
For her exhibition “Period Drama” at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, which opened in November 2023, Ackroyd produced her largest body of work to date. Within two highly charged environments, spread across two floors, viewers explore false memories, fragmented narratives, matrilineality, and unconscious fears and longings. I spoke with Ackroyd in early January to discuss the exhibition, and what ideas fed into the work and its making. The result was a discussion about storytelling, memory, fragmentation, and how to make sense of things in the world.
Kyla McDonald: Let’s talk about “Period Drama” — what were your ideas and aspirations for the exhibition?
Rebecca Ackroyd: My jumping-off point for the show was that it was going to be over two galleries, one on top of the other connected by an internal staircase. I began to think of it as a house, each gallery being a different room or headspace. The upstairs gallery — which has this domed ceiling — became the attic or the “thinking space” where I wanted to have an explosion of ideas and content. I saw downstairs as the engine room — like a whirring belly — that would hold one succinct idea. It was interesting that the building used to be a women’s bathhouse, and originally, no ceiling or floor was separating these spaces. This led me to think about absence and loss — a longstanding interest of mine — and having the sculptures as stand-in figures for absent bodies. I started to think of them as characters or actors, representing the bodies that would have inhabited the space at another time.
KM What was your process for making work for the exhibition?
RA I wanted the whole exhibition to be an experiment in making — a way to think through what sculpture is to me. While making the various elements for the show, I thought a lot about layering and pushing those elements towards one another. None of the sculptures were made beforehand. I brought all the different parts together in situ precisely because I wanted to be surprised by what happened in the space and for it to feel like an active experience rather than a passive one. That made it a more daunting yet exciting experience for me, and as a result, I feel it possesses a lot of energy. In the past, I’ve found myself frustrated with making, as I often felt that when I finished a sculpture and then exhibited it, it would suddenly feel almost dead. I wanted this show to feel different — for the objects to feel animated and alive. This also related to the idea of stop-motion filmmaking that I’ve been researching lately, and so throughout the exhibition, there are several sculptures that have recurring fragments; they are like echoes, or repetitions, of a moment in time. Sometimes, I find that there’s a “formality” in making art, and that’s not something I’m particularly interested in. I wanted this exhibition, or the making of the exhibition, to be more informal. I saw it as a piece of writing or something like that, and throughout the process, I wasn’t thinking about sculpture but rather about cinema and films by Peter Greenaway or Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and how narrative is constructed.
KM This idea of a “fragment” seems to be both an important subject and a visual motif for you. As you briefly mention, several sculptures have the same cast of an arm, or a hand, or a pair of legs, for example, placed next to each other in succession, almost cascading. They are already representing a part of a larger whole, but as they repeat, they become even more fragmented — can you tell me what you are exploring there?
RA It’s funny because the fragment as a recurring motif was never something I consciously decided to do. I think it started with the drawings, as I first began making them on these torn pieces of paper, which would then be scaled up. I find it hard to contain something, and I’ve always liked the idea of something being infinite or that it’s part of a bigger conversation. However, as my work has developed, the “fragment” has become a more conscious idea. Its connection to, say, fragments of conversation or the idea of memory has been present in the work for a while, but more recently, I’ve been thinking about it in terms of constructed realities, or what is real and what isn’t in relation to how memory works — that memories can sometimes be based on non-truths. I’ve become increasingly interested in hearing stories about family members who died before I was born, and so I’ve been recording conversations with my mum and aunt about their lives — trying to make a record of the people around me and their experiences and memories. I realized how transient these memories are. My mum told me the other day about how one of her grandmothers had hair down to her feet, and her other grandmother was the local “wise woman” — both incredible images to hold in your mind. I’m fascinated that their knowledge is now only contained in frayed pieces of memory that have then been passed down to my mother and now to me. They’re part of our shared family history, and while they make a nice narrative, we don’t know whether they are true. Such ideas of memory fragmentation fed into the Kestner show, alongside thinking through how narratives are constructed in film. I’ve been looking at a lot of contact proofs from the negatives of 35mm film lately, from Hitchcock, for example, and how editing on film used to happen – physically splicing the negative to create suspense and build a narrative. That very analogue approach, rooted in the material of celluloid film, of cutting one frame and putting it next to the other resonates with my approach to making — to build a semblance of meaning from fragments.
KM I love this idea that we are filmmakers — or editors — in our minds, constantly trying to make sense or form a narrative out of our memories or through stories we have been told. In thinking about memory and those amazing stories about your great-grandmothers, I see resonances between your work and Annie Ernaux’s collective autobiography The Years (2008). Your work contains several personal elements connected to your life — for example, the casts of body parts are either yours or of your sisters or mother, or a drawing depicts an intimate detail of your mother’s eye. You’ve never named your work an autobiography, but I find there’s something in it, like Ernaux, that uses the personal to explore more universal themes, especially in relation to being a woman. I’m curious about your thoughts on these ideas – is this something you also recognize in the work?
RA Absolutely. When I first read The Years, I remember photographing the first sentence — “All the images will disappear” — as it really spoke to me. I think the way Ernaux uses a photograph as a starting point to describe a family moment is interesting and relates directly to the idea that I discussed earlier about the “truth” of a memory or what a fragment can represent. I think this is what I find so fascinating in general about Ernaux, that her work reflects human experiences, especially female, and even though the book is about her life, she never makes it exclusively about herself — it can easily be translated onto another person. Like when she writes about the first time she got a color TV, I related that to how my mum, a similar age to Ernaux, would have experienced something similar, although in the UK. I enjoyed how it speaks of growing up in a postwar country, of going through all these technological advances, of huge social changes, of raising a family, and what it was like to live in a patriarchal society in that particular moment, and what bearing all of that has on a life. In terms of myself making art, I’m also very much constrained by who I am and what I’ve experienced. To feel connected to the work I’m making, I need it to relate to my life somehow, but it should also connect to a more generalized idea of experiencing the world and being a body in that world. So, the analogy of The Years is really helpful because while it’s about her, she manages to make it a “we” rather than “I,” which speaks to the matter or material of life more broadly.
KM Speaking of shared cultural experiences, I was intrigued by the cut-out images of film and TV dramas from the mid-1990s to early 2000s — Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Titanic (1997), and the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice — that were attached to certain sculptures in “Period Drama.” They were not really the focus of any particular piece but appeared almost like little footnotes among the objects. They reminded me of being a teenager, and I felt immediately embarrassed by my adolescent attachment to the normative portrayal of love and romance that they proliferated.
RA This is one of the first times I’ve used cultural references in such a direct way. Those films were also really present in my teenage years, and I was thinking about what bearing they had on me at that time, but also that when I see or think about them, they bring back very specific memories of the time and place I watched them. When Pride and Prejudice first came out, I watched it religiously every Sunday evening with my family. Later, it became another sort of familial experience, as throughout my adolescence, whenever my sister or I felt low, we would watch the show. I see that period in time as almost the “golden age of rom-com.” In my mind, those films are connected to a moment where whenever anyone I knew got married, the wedding was a huge theater. I now recognize that those films played into ideas of marriage, happiness, and love in a way that was, as you say, normative and almost unhinged. Perhaps weddings are still a huge extravagant thing for some people, but I know fewer people do that nowadays. This connected very much to the ideas I was exploring around what is real and what is fiction and the stories we tell ourselves about happiness. Those films fed directly into a narrative about life or rather an expectation of what life should be or look like. I listened to a podcast about Titanic when I was making the work for Kestner, attempting to decode the myth around the life that Jack and Rose would have had if he’d got on to the door and not died. It wouldn’t necessarily have been the happy love story the film wanted us to believe. In reality, they would have probably been poor and lived a very hard existence. In another way, I was thinking about how cinema and TV can punctuate a life — like how re-watching or recalling something can take you back to a specific moment. Whenever I think about Pride and Prejudice, I’m immediately transported back to my parents’ living room with my sister. And so, I felt that by slapping those references quite directly onto the sculptures, I could play with that idea of time and narrative, as the works would then be grounded in the present but also in the time and place that those films came out, or were watched, by the viewers of the exhibition.
KM On a slight tangent, I would love for you to tell me a little about the Tarot readings you’ve had lately and if they have any bearing on your practice.
RA At first, I was seeking advice that had nothing to do with my art, but it did bleed into my practice, mainly through drawing. I’m drawn to Tarot as a process because it offers an alternative way of looking at someone’s life — that it makes sense of something intangible. The readings I’ve had so far mirror what is happening in my life, almost pointing arrows at particular issues that I know are present but I somehow need to gain more clarity on. I named the large paintings — Empress (2023) and High Priestess (2023) — in the downstairs gallery in “Period Drama” after cards that came up in the readings, and I saw those as representing two sides of a self. The six Empress drawings are engines. They demonstrate a real physicality, a self that has an urgent presence and, in some way, is rooted in fertility and the body. In a sense, they represented timekeeping or an idea of time. The flower drawing is the High Priestess, and it references a more focused but aloof sense of self. It’s much more distant from the ideas explored by the engines. With other exhibitions, I’ve engaged a shaman to come give a reading of a space — to talk about the energies in the room. I’ve always been fascinated by the layers of history that spaces can hold that not everyone can see or feel. With these alternative or esoteric practices, I’m generally interested in exploring where ideas come from, where images come from, and how that connects to art-making.
KM “Period Drama” will be transformed into another exhibition at Fondaco Marcello in Venice in spring 2024. What is your vision for that?
RA That iteration is called “Mirror Stage,” and broadly takes Jacques Lacan’s idea of the toddler’s first discovery of the self as separate from its mother. The gallery is smaller, so it will be a reduced or succinct version of the ideas seen in “Period Drama.” Still, it is again led by an exploration of fragmentation — of an image or memory. Going back to the idea of the rooms in the Kestner being the basement and attic, because of its smaller size and also because water is everywhere in Venice, I’ve begun to think of that space in the “house” as a room of reflection, of solitude, of escape — as a kind of dreamy bathroom!
