Moving between the intimate and the cosmic, Rebecca Ackroyd’s Floaters brings together new paintings, sculptures and images that draw from an expanding archive of personal memories and found imagery. Familiar forms drift into strange constellations, domestic spaces open into imagined worlds, childhood motifs meet military patterns, while bodies, planets and memories appear as fragments, reflections and doubles, expanding into something dreamlike, psychedelic, or vast.
Throughout Ackroyd’s practice, memory is less a fixed repository than a shifting material. It is something continually reconstructed through images, stories and experience. “When you change, your memory changes,” the artist has said, describing memory as necessarily fragmentary and transforming over time. In the exhibition this floating state takes physical form. Images drawn from family photographs and children’s sticker albums sit alongside astronomical and microscopic imagery. Stars, hearts and flowers coexist with tools, household appliances and camouflage. The deeply personal slips into the collective, as seemingly innocent or familiar symbols acquire new and sometimes unsettling associations.
Ackroyd’s relief-like wall works transform ordinary objects and architectural elements into strangely psychological spaces. A washing machine opens onto a night sky, while a radiator is scattered with hearts and a unicorn drawn from a sticker album. Elsewhere, tools orbit one another like the components of an unfamiliar planetary system. In other works, bodily and organic forms curl, loop and spiral, oscillating between the anatomical and the abstract. The domestic can become cosmic and the body can become landscape.
These collisions recall the associative logic of childhood, when radically different things can inhabit the same imaginative universe without contradiction. Ackroyd has described her fascination with sticker albums as attempts to contain an entire world through archetypal images. In Floaters, their rainbows, stars, flowers and other tiny emblems spread across sculptural surfaces, colliding with objects and images carrying very different histories. Camouflage, for instance, is detached from its military function and transformed into something light and innocent, almost decorative, while retaining an uneasy trace of the violence embedded in its origins. Images surface, disappear and return altered, as though moving through the unstable architecture of a dream.
This movement extends into Frank’s Daughter, the first performative piece written by Ackroyd, which will take place within the exhibition space on 26 November at 7pm. Drawing together stories from the artist’s own life, that of her mother and her aunt, the performance shifts the exhibition’s concern with memory and inheritance into language, voice and the body. Personal histories become mutable material once again – retold, reimagined and passed from one person to another.
—Text: Dr. Luisa Seipp
