SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling

Introduction

Welcome to the audio description for Roger Ackling’s work Autumn, 1982 which is displayed in the exhibition SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling.

The work is located in the first room of the Sculpture Galleries at Henry Moore Institute, a large space with white walls and a grey floor. There are lots of small wooden sculptures and framed works by Roger Ackling, a British sculptor who lived and worked in London and Norfolk. He passed away in 2014 at the age of 67 and this exhibition is the first survey of the artist’s work.

Ackling is best known for his technique of burning lines into found wood using sunlight and a magnifying glass. In this recording, Amanda Geitner, the curator of the exhibition, describes the work and explains how it might have been created.

Audio description

Hi, my name is Amanda Geitner. I’m the curator of SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling. We are in the first gallery of the exhibition, so as you come in through the doors, if you turn immediately to your right, this is the very first work. So it’s made on a piece of card and it’s a slightly brown mottled card, the sort of card you might have on a big drawing pad.

In fact, it’s about an A3 size, it’s wider than it is high. And it was Ackling’s habit to use, found or discarded materials. So it is quite likely that it’s part of a piece of packaging or a box or come off the back of a pad. And about a third of the way up, it has a big semi-circular arc, and what the artist has done is drawing a big semi-circle and then about two millimetres apart, put lines all the way across it in very, very fine pencil. Now he’s burnt over these with a magnifying glass, but they’re not all burnt over. So it’s kind of patchy. It’s almost like, um, burnt Morse code or braille where there are gaps, and then solid bits and gaps and solid bits. And as you look at it, it takes a while to understand that what you’re looking at is him burning across the lines that he’s drawn in pencil on a cloudy day, and when the clouds have come across and above him and obscured the sun from his magnifying glass, you can see the pencil line underneath. When the clouds have passed and the sun is hitting his magnifying glass, that’s when you’re getting a much, much thicker burnt line. When I say thicker, it’s probably a bit over a millimetre thick. The sort of thickness of a felt tip pen. And even though it’s burned, it looks kind of drawn like something you would draw with your hand. And I suppose that’s because it is a very handheld thing.

So he would’ve prepared the semicircle and the lines within it, the horizontal lines within it, first with the pencil, and then he would’ve taken it outside. He probably sat in a chair. He would’ve held his magnifying glass in his right hand. And if you think of a magnifying glass, you might imagine something that has a handle. He wouldn’t have held it by a handle. He would’ve had the magnifying glass, just the glass outside of any handle, and he would’ve put his forefinger and thumb around it. And he would’ve focused the sun over his right shoulder through the magnifying glass and slowly burnt the lines as the sun came out.

The thing I like about this is while this semicircle with the dots and the dashes of the burnt and unburnt lines is a kind of diagram of what was happening above him in the sky. There’s also a feather. There’s a quite little brown and white feather stuck on the cardboard beneath that semicircle right in the centre, and it’s almost like he’s saying while I was making a drawing of what was happening in the sky above me, I picked up this little thing off the ground. And it’s interesting he chose to pick up a feather because of course a feather would’ve been something he picked up off the ground. But it’s also something of the sky.

Introduction

This audio description introduces Roger Ackling’s Weybourne, created in June 1997. Weybourne is a village on the Norfolk coast where Ackling lived and worked. He often collected driftwood and other discarded materials found along the shore, reshaping them into poetic sculptures. Listen to the curator Amanda Geitner as she shares insight into how Ackling used these materials in his practice.

Audio description

When you come into the gallery, we’re standing at the wall opposite the entrance doors and we are standing at the far-right end of that wall. Weybourne 1997, it’s about 15 and a half centimetres wide and 25 centimetres high. And if I hold up my hand to it, it’s just a bit bigger than the palm of my hand, and about as wide as if I spread out my fingers.

It’s a little flat piece of wood with quite smooth edges so it doesn’t look like the artist has cut it down. And the background of this wood has got white paint on it, but the white paint is really worn. It’s almost rubbed away. And then on top of that, the artist has burnt two parallel lines of burns. They go from top to bottom, almost from the very top to the very bottom, and they have a gap in between them. And there are many, many, many, many lines. They’re all quite close together, though the line isn’t very long. It’s probably about a centimetre and a half. That’s all each of the lines.

And it’s very typical of Ackling’s work in this period. It’s called Wayburn 1997. The titles always tell us where he made them and this was made at, the Coastguard Cottage at the village of Wayburn on the North Norfolk coast in the UK. It’s really interesting these works made of driftwood because they’re all different like driftwood always is.

But I suppose what they have in common is that driftwood had a utility. In fact, it was industrial. A lot of driftwood is packaging or bits from the fishing industry or even old boats having been broken up and washed as shore. So the wood originally had a purpose, but it spent all this time in the water and it’s been bashed by sand and stones and waves. So it’s kind of lost that original utility and it’s become completely ambiguous. In a way it becomes quite evocative that it was once used for something that it was once crafted for a particular purpose, but we can’t tell what that is any more. And then Roger’s found it and by focusing the Sun’s light and paying his attention to the work, he’s invested it with these amazing lines and this amazing sense of power.

I think the other thing that’s really interesting about Roger Ackling is he always burnt in lines. He would burn from left to right, and that’s the way that a lot of script goes. It looks like language, it looks like writing, and he was really interested in poetry when he was younger. Funnily enough, what this work looks like is a list. And in the archive, we have a bird list of all the birds that Ackling saw on the Orkney Islands in 1990, written in two very neat parallel columns, just like this work. So because of this sort of linear format and because they’re black, I think Roger Ackling’s work often looks like it contains information that maybe there’s some meaning to it that is just on the edge of legibility that we just can’t quite understand. And I love that about this little powerful work.

Introduction

This audio description focuses on Voewood, a group of fourteen objects made between 2011 and 2012 by Roger Ackling. Ackling often named his works after the places where they were made. Many of these are titled Voewood, after the cottage in the grounds of Voewood House – an arts and crafts hall in Norfolk – where he later moved.

The work is situated in the second room of the galleries, a large space with white walls and a shiny grey floor. Skylights in the ceiling fill the room with natural sunlight. In this recording, curator Amanda Geitner invites us to look closely and shares her reflections on the pieces.

Audio description

As we’ve come through from Gallery one, it’s on the wall immediately to your right. There are three works on that wall, and this is the one in the middle. It’s a work in fourteen parts. It’s not framed, and those parts aren’t on a backboard. It’s fourteen individual little pieces that are individually stuck to the wall. And they’re stuck to the wall in a line along a centre line. So the centre of every piece is at the same level, but that means that because they’re all different sizes, their tops and their bottoms are all in different places. And each one is a couple of centimetres apart, and they’re all new things.

Unlike the work with driftwood, these objects haven’t had a previous life. They’re all wood, but they’re all of really low value. They’re all the sort of things we discard. There are those kind of wooden little spatula spoons that you get on the top of ice cream containers. There is a clothes peg. There is one of those little wooden chip forks that you get that’s got two little spines at the top.

There’s a couple of longer segments of wood. There’s a takeaway wooden fork. There’s half of one of those wooden clothes pegs that is levered by a little metal spring in the middle. And then there’s another of the old-fashioned wooden clothes pegs that look like they have two little legs that look like people.

And then there’s a few other, sort of haberdashery bits and bobs. And there’s a little wooden circle on the end that looks like a button that’s even got a little white elastic band coming out the middle of it. And what’s interesting is because they’re really ordinary, but they’ve all been burnt.

They’ve mainly been burnt down their edges in most cases. They have a stripe down the middle of the bare wood that ling hasn’t burned, but most of them are burnt on their edges. They’re very black against this very white wall. And because they’re hung across their middle and the bottoms and the tops are at different levels, they look like a sound wave or, one of those echograms, you know, one of the machines in hospitals that goes boop, boop, you know, a sort of wave. So they’re really dynamic. They’re just these funny little takeaway forks and pegs and things, burnt and then stuck to a wall, and yet they have this amazing presence to them. They convey so much more weight than their physical lightness.

Introduction

This is an audio description of Roger Ackling’s workbag and tools, displayed in the third room of the galleries. The space is smaller than the others, giving the room a more intimate feeling. On the left wall are framed works and a large wall text titled ‘Archive’. To your right, there is a TV which shows interviews with Ackling’s peers. In the centre, a small plinth holds a display showing Ackling’s tools. Along the back wall, there’s a long table with a case which holds papers, photographs and ephemera, all related to Roger Ackling’s life and work. In this recording, curator Amanda Geitner talks us through these items, offering us a glimpse into the tools the artist used to make and install his work.

Audio description

We are looking at a case with lots of different things in it, and it basically is one of Roger Ackling’s workbags. So this wouldn’t have been something that he would’ve shown in public in his lifetime. It’s the bag that he would’ve carried with him when he made work. But more importantly, when he made exhibitions. He made 160 solo exhibitions in his lifetime.

At the back of the case, we’ve got a quite rough tough cotton draw string bag. And the draw strings are like ropes and it’s a kind of brown colour. It’s like the bag that you would’ve put your plimsolls in to go to school, sort of like a gym bag, and it’s about thirty centimetres high and about twenty centimetres across, and all the other things in the case would’ve fit inside it.

There’s the hat that he wore to keep the sun off his ears while he was making work, and that’s a khaki green cotton hat and it’s got a CND campaign, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament little badge on it. And then along the front of the case from right to left, there’s a small metalhead, but wooden handled hammer, a paint brush, a pair of pliers with black handles.

A little handheld drill, an old envelope that has bits of rubber band and sticky things in it. A few different bits of sandpaper, some cotton spools, and some bits of twine. A very big ball of Blu Tack. He liked to glue his works to the wall with Blu Tack.

And then quite a few different boxes, at least five here. Clear plastic boxes with old bits of tape on them that have got pins of different sizes on them. Because Roger would just, with that little handheld hammer, tap a pin into the wall and hang his work on it. And then there’s two spools of fishing line. He also often used fishing lines to attach his work to the wall.

One of the things I love in this case, and the last thing I’m going to talk about is one of his magnifying glasses. It’s about eight centimetres across and sitting on the white paint of the case, it looks pale blue and he would’ve held it in his hand between his forefinger and his thumb to make his work. It’s lovely to have one of his lenses in the exhibition too.

I hope that visitors to this exhibition come away understanding a lot more about the artist Roger Ackling, about who he was and how he made his work. And I hope the archive material really contributes to that. I know that for people who already know Roger’s work, they’re going to come away so glad to have seen it again and to see so much of it. And for those who have never seen Roger’s work before, I hope they come away with a real sense of wonder.