ART CITIES: Seoul-Rebecca Ackroyd

Rebecca Ackroyd received a BA in Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London (2010); and a post-graduate diploma in Fine Art at the Royal Academy, London (2015). Her work depicts ordinary images in eerily off-putting settings and contexts, revealing the strange and the uncanny within the familiar. She draws out questions of contemporary sexuality, personal and national identity, and the performance of femininity, blending abstraction, figuration and drawing.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Peres Projects Archive

Made up of new works on paper as well as two sculptures, Rebecca Ackroyd in “Fertile Ground”, her first solo exhibition in Asia, describes an encounter with a building site in London as the impetus for this exhibition. A deep gash in the ground, reveals a complex system of pipes and metal within the foundation of the planned structure. In Fertile Ground, the artist explores the infrastructure of the subconscious, and the subterranean workings of memory. The materials for the foundation of a building are heavy, made up of stone, concrete and steel. Yet Ackroyd’s works are anything but stable, her surreal compositions of mundane and domestic subjects such as fasteners and drains trigger a feeling of failed recognition, eliding fixed meaning, and despite the rosy color palette of soft pinks, reds, greens and oranges, invoke an uncanny atmosphere and an emotionally ambiguous charge. The exhibition is punctuated by a repeating spiral pattern which feels as if it leads us into the recesses of the psyche. This visual symbol for time references Ackroyd’s ongoing dialogue with psychoanalysis, and the dialectical relationship between memory and the subject. A central tension in her work is the rehearsal of the past in the present, and the slippery and fragmented character of memory, distorted in time through its retelling and repetition and how this nonetheless provides the structure of the subconscious and the foundation for the present. In the titular sculpture, the artist has cast herself wearing a pair of her mother’s boots in epoxy resin. The torso and legs are separated, suspended above and within a metal cage, while circular saw blades are positioned in the place of the diaphragm and below the seat of the legs. The translucent material and fragmented, rough edges gives the work a spectral quality. The boots from the 1960’s worn today by the artist contributes to this haunting temporal compression – the past in the present, an activation of memory. This intergenerational dialogue gestures at another temporal mode – how the body keeps time through fertility. Ackroyd’s practice of self-reflexively delves into the link between creative expression and the unconscious. The development of her pieces reflect a spontaneity and freedom in the creative process, while remaining tethered to her own experiences. As the artist’s work becomes increasingly personal and vulnerable, it reflects her own individual experiences, memories and the shifting substrates of time.

Photo: Rebecca Ackroyd, Hunt and Gather, 2020, 48 x 80 x 26 cm (19 x 32 x 11 in), © Rebecca Ackroyd, Courtesy the artist and Peres Projects

Info: Peres Projects, THE SHILLA Seoul B1, 249 Dongho-ro, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea, Duration: 30/8-13/10/2022, https://peresprojects.com/