Sunlight: Roger Ackling

 

Curated by Amanda Geitner, Leeds Henry Moore Institute (UK) recently had the second posthumous staging of ‘Sunlight: Roger Ackling’: sculptural pieces, collected writings and drawn work by artist and respected educator Roger Ackling. Supplemented by filmed interviews with Ackling’s peer-group, ex-students and collaborators, it jigsawed into an affectionate portrait of a popular artist and supportive teacher.

There’s a dogged consistency running through the practice with its foundations in the 1960s and 1970s art school impulses towards both sculptural minimalism and a contrary liking for a romantic attachment to recording the landscape and land art.

The majority of displayed works were produced by focusing the sun through a hand-held magnifying glass to burn marks and lines into and onto card, found scraps of wood, rickety fragments of driftwood, twigs, gardening utensils handles, lolly sticks, overlooked scraps and leftovers. When applied to fully three dimensional sculptural cast-off objects the miniature circular desire lines go nowhere, a circling ornamentation of banding rings in a shadowy charcoal grey.

The disciplined drag of a burn mark acts as an ossified string of negative miniature suns tattooing wood and cardboard. Haecceity, a thing’s uniqueness, is undercut by Ackling’s repeated compulsion to mark in a simple artisanal but near-mechanistic fashion, a branding of objects surfaces to regularise things into groups.

In the flat card surface of ‘Cloud Arc’ (1979), a stack of parallel burnt lines showed stuttering interruptions in the lines consistencies as clouds cut off the power source of the sun’s rays hitting the magnifying glass.

For ‘The Turning Of The Earth The Falling Of The Sap’ (1978), five curving ash white branches of varying lengths carried a burnt line of roughly equivalent lengths running down the front facing verticality of the wall mounted wood. They acted as compacts of visualities, both elusive line and sculptural mass as modes of presentation.

The majority of objects and wooden scraps used in Ackling’s work may be discovered out in a landscape, natural entropy and the cycle of the seasons carried in the surfaces and fragmented forms, but they invariably already carry markings and constructive signs of human intervention.

Many of Ackling’s displayed works and assemblages were constructed from bits and pieces, spaciously infecting the gallery walls. An implied organizing matrix of verticals and horizontals always underpinned his act of transcribing the chaos of reality’s messiness into the stuff of art.

An example was ‘Voewood’ (2011-2012); chip forks, lolly sticks, wooden clothes pegs, etc presented as a wall-mounted line of vertical objects each item scored with horizontal pileups of burn lines.

For Ackling there appeared to be a material stratum underpinning the process of thinking. Disciplined materiality became a form of technology which prompted thinking with the selected objects treated in such a way that they became stamped with a certain tonal character, the results suggested melancholic spectres of solidity pointing to a nostalgia for the tradition of hand-crafted objects.

Examples of Ackling’s obsessive recording of details in drawn plans, notes, photographs, and documentation served to stress the centrality of recording process and a compulsion to order the randomness of experience, ordering that which just is.  An obsessive archiving of moments of productive disengagement.

A good example was Birdlist 15/07/90 from his Orkney Isle travel Journal.

This listing procedure served to record what had occurred but maintained Ackling at a distance, a dispassionate observer / recorder, curiously absent whilst physically present.

In the accompanying exhibition catalogue for ‘Sunlight: Roger Ackling’, Louis Nixon grouped Ackling in with Richard Long and Hamish Fulton as an artist who took the productive process of doing ‘art’ out into the environment of the landscape.

Dr Rosy Gray’s preface seemed more pithily germane emphasising that the work prompts conversations about ‘’…the status of the object, the significance of material, the process of making, and the transformative power of display.’’

The central importance of the aesthetics of display cannot be overstated.

On the gallery’s longest wall, a number of pieces from different periods were presented on nine boxy shelving plinths at varying display heights. A clumping of plinths was avoided and the objects became curiously flat and heavy against the 3D whiteness and the side shadows of the boxy shelves.

For Ackling’s practice it seems more accurate to note that he used studio and gallery as a directive funnelling and editing of his material tinkering towards aesthetic display, the unavoidable final element completing the ‘art’ process.  

Both in his handwritten notes and in the playful gnomic utterances recollected by his students, he seemed to consistently double-back to a consideration of the most effective and seductive qualities of the material elements co-present in an artwork. Compressing these into a purely visual experience, removing the intimacy of touch whilst suggesting its centrality to the wider process of production, all seemed important to the construction of the final displays.

For Ackling, ‘art’ appeared to be a compensatory transcriptive aestheticization of the playful energy of authentic object-events from the real world.

Finally, Ackling’s work humanised larger forces with a lightness of touch which sat in contradistinction to the comedic egotism of his practice. After all, artists who purchase volcanoes or cut passageways through mountains seem tragically unambitious in comparison to one who tethered the sun to a controlled focal point, disciplining the chaos of the universe into enjoyable aesthetic events with humour and humility.