Gouache, soft pastel on Somerset satin paper Framed: 42 x 36 x 4cm (16.5 x 14.2 x 1.6 in.)
About Rebecca Ackroyd
Ackroyd’s dream-like fictional landscapes often resemble apocalyptic fantasies devoid of gender and taboo; exploring wild and domestic spaces, ruin and contraction, desire and disgust. She received her Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy, London and her BA from Byam Shaw School of Art London.
Ackroyd is interested in the twinned experiences of personal and collective memory, and how we reconcile their dissonance in our lives. Her recent work deals with personal psychology, through an exploration of dreams and through strategies of compartmentalization – both tools for processing and digesting our experiences.
Ackroyd’s recent works on paper often center around hair. It sweeps through the composition to camouflage or cradle objects, letters and other signifiers, with an agency of its own. These clues lead us through a narrative surrounding contemporary experiences of femininity within urban spaces. The drawings are fragments, the whole is obscured, the body is abstracted through scale and repetition, becoming both bodily and speculative.
Rebecca Ackroyd (b. 1987, UK) lives and works between Berlin and London.
About Refuge
In England and Wales, 1 in 4 women experience domestic abuse during their lifetime and two women a week are killed by a current or former partner.
Refuge opened the world’s first safe house for women and children in 1971 in West London. Now services include safe emergency accommodation through refuges in secret locations across the country; community-based outreach services; culturally specific services for women; a modern slavery service; independent advocacy services for women at the highest risk; a range of single point of access services for women, children and men across entire regions; and the Freephone 24 Hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline.
