SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling

SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling is the first survey and most comprehensive exhibition of the work of artist Roger Ackling (1947-2014), one of the most quietly influential artists of the late twentieth century.

For fifty years Ackling made objects by burning wood – focusing sunlight through the lens of a hand-held magnifying glass to scorch repeated patterns of lines on the surface. Collecting driftwood from the beach at Weybourne near his home on the Norfolk coastline, as well as reclaimed broken and discarded materials, Ackling took little from the world to make his work and left nothing beyond a wisp of smoke in the air. His primary tool was the light of the sun – transforming energy in a process that was fundamentally photographic and yet also akin to a cauterising of the surface, much like a tattoo.

The exhibition reveals the breadth of Ackling’s practice, from his earliest experiments with a lens, to his final works.  Like his contemporaries Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, who also graduated from Saint Martin’s School of Art in the late 1960s, Ackling challenged the traditional and accepted methods of making sculpture by taking his art out of the studio and into the landscape environment. Ackling is best known for his work on found driftwood, but SUNLIGHT expands this reputation to include lesser-known works made using domestic wooden objects and tools, and incorporating ready-made elements such as elastic bands and mapping pins.

After his death Roger Ackling’s archive was gifted to the Archive of Sculptors’ Papers which is housed at Henry Moore Institute and part of Leeds Museums and Galleries’ collections. Photographs, plans and sketches, notes for teaching, the bag of tools he took with him when making exhibitions and even the magnifying lens he used to made work are on display in the exhibition, providing a full picture of the artist and his work.

Ackling’s career is notable for both his unique practice and his long and influential teaching career. SUNLIGHT reveals the artist as a socially engaged, highly networked individual, consistently dedicated to making, exhibiting and teaching – in equal measure, with each activity influencing the other. Ackling’s work is shown alongside previously unseen and little-known materials from the artist’s extensive archive and a film of interviews with fellow artists and students such as Tony Cragg, Maggi Hambling, Dean Hughes and David Nash examining the impact and legacy of Ackling’s practice.

From the mid-1970s, Ackling exhibited consistently internationally – most frequently in France, Switzerland, the US and Japan – but his work was comparatively less seen at home. He showed in lively and playful installations, arriving in a space with a suitcase full of works to install each object by hand. Informed by the Roger Ackling archive, SUNLIGHT references key exhibitions at distinct stages of his career as precedent for installations to capture the grouping and rhythm of work as Ackling intended.

SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling is curated by Amanda Geitner and is developed in partnership with the Artist’s Estate, Annely Juda Fine Art, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and the Pier Arts Centre.

An accompanying hardback publication includes contributions from Sylvia Ackling, Amanda Geitner, Rosy Gray, Dean Hughes, Louis Nixon and Ian Parker, alongside a wealth of illustrations of both works and archival material.

SUNLIGHT was first exhibited at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery in 2024 and will travel on to Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, opening on 12 July 2025.

A series of events accompany the exhibition, including a curator’s tour, open archive sessions, engagement workshops and a conference – Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Art and Changing Environments will be held at Henry Moore Institute on Wednesday 21 May 2025. Coinciding with the exhibitions SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling and Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance, on display at Henry Moore Institute, the event will explore artists’ engagement with climate, as well as the creative and destructive forces of nature.