Blog
‘What is it?’
Review of Roger Ackling’s exhibition ‘Sunlight’ at Norwich Castle Museum
22/05/2024
Don’t ask ‘What does it mean’, ask ‘What is it?’
Roger Ackling’s exhibition ‘Sunlight’ was opened by Simon Ofield-Kerr with these words, and they feel like a glass of fresh water. No need then to refer to context, art history, his influences and friends.
What are they? ‘Sunlight’ is a gentle word, caressing, evocative, but the sun is the monstrous atomic generator of our universe, powerful beyond imagination, obliviously pumping out energy whose effects are benign and destructive.
Roger sits by the sea with his little mirror forcing the mighty sun along bits of weathered wood with his will and his steady hand. Line below line - you have to ask how he makes them so straight, so uniform, so mechanical. Why this size and not that? why horizontal? Burning so evenly is an act of controlled damage like cutting, and the lines are also a way of cross-hatching, drawing, the muscular connections between brain, eye and hand operating together.
Line after line - why? obsessive, without function, a choice he sticks with, showing the sunlight who is boss. Did he ever get bored with his own particular process, which became a path, an identity? did he feel trapped by the lines?
Does Roger want to be a machine? he allows the substrate to have had a rich life, evidenced by its weathered surface, and then he imposes a quasi-mechanical motif on it, making it his, making it him. He suits the motif to the surface, larger, smaller, its geometry echoing and contrasting with the wood.
He used what was to hand - but not really. He ran out of driftwood and a friend gave him lolly sticks! maybe the friend was teasing him about his romantically-found materials? Someone brings him what he calls ‘lolly sticks’ and they are his Thing. He probably liked the childish word, and this is part of the intrinsic nose-thumbing of Roger’s work. He could have gone Big, gone Long, scaled it all up so each work would stop you in your tracks with its monumental scale, but he does the opposite.
You picture him wandering along the beach or wood rummaging around, lighting on a tiny shapely thing, seeing it and its possibilities. A form can be huge or miniscule - when it is art, is there any purpose to being either big or small? Hold the form to your eye, it is big. Stand far away, it is small.
Lolly sticks start out as trees, timber, cut down, encased in ice-cream, packaged, stored, licked, thrown away, weathered by tongues, a moment’s tasty fun. Not like the sea-tossed driftwood, shed from a ship in a storm, carried to the Baltic, turning up at Sheringham, accidentally coming into Roger’s path. Quite like the trajectory of a beam of sunlight, made from gaseous explosions, travelling millions of miles, falling wherever it falls.
You can infer contentment from the large number of Roger’s works, see him sitting peacefully on the shore, the regular rhythm of the sea matching the rhythm of his hand and glass moving carefully over the wood, the small plume of smoke. He controls the sunlight like a rider controls a great big racehorse, man against nature, man with nature. The sense of Roger’s touch is always everywhere in his objects - calling them ‘work’ sounds pedestrian. Touch of sun, of sea, of fire.
Chance encounters in the wild with things that will become his substrates - in the gallery these will be exquisitely placed, each thing with lovely white clean airy space around it, lighting completely considered, hung in relation to the body of the audience, each gentle shadow surely cherished.
So - what is if?
Roger Ackling’s exhibition ‘Sunlight’ was opened by Simon Ofield-Kerr with these words, and they feel like a glass of fresh water. No need then to refer to context, art history, his influences and friends.
What are they? ‘Sunlight’ is a gentle word, caressing, evocative, but the sun is the monstrous atomic generator of our universe, powerful beyond imagination, obliviously pumping out energy whose effects are benign and destructive.
Roger sits by the sea with his little mirror forcing the mighty sun along bits of weathered wood with his will and his steady hand. Line below line - you have to ask how he makes them so straight, so uniform, so mechanical. Why this size and not that? why horizontal? Burning so evenly is an act of controlled damage like cutting, and the lines are also a way of cross-hatching, drawing, the muscular connections between brain, eye and hand operating together.
Line after line - why? obsessive, without function, a choice he sticks with, showing the sunlight who is boss. Did he ever get bored with his own particular process, which became a path, an identity? did he feel trapped by the lines?
Does Roger want to be a machine? he allows the substrate to have had a rich life, evidenced by its weathered surface, and then he imposes a quasi-mechanical motif on it, making it his, making it him. He suits the motif to the surface, larger, smaller, its geometry echoing and contrasting with the wood.
He used what was to hand - but not really. He ran out of driftwood and a friend gave him lolly sticks! maybe the friend was teasing him about his romantically-found materials? Someone brings him what he calls ‘lolly sticks’ and they are his Thing. He probably liked the childish word, and this is part of the intrinsic nose-thumbing of Roger’s work. He could have gone Big, gone Long, scaled it all up so each work would stop you in your tracks with its monumental scale, but he does the opposite.
You picture him wandering along the beach or wood rummaging around, lighting on a tiny shapely thing, seeing it and its possibilities. A form can be huge or miniscule - when it is art, is there any purpose to being either big or small? Hold the form to your eye, it is big. Stand far away, it is small.
Lolly sticks start out as trees, timber, cut down, encased in ice-cream, packaged, stored, licked, thrown away, weathered by tongues, a moment’s tasty fun. Not like the sea-tossed driftwood, shed from a ship in a storm, carried to the Baltic, turning up at Sheringham, accidentally coming into Roger’s path. Quite like the trajectory of a beam of sunlight, made from gaseous explosions, travelling millions of miles, falling wherever it falls.
You can infer contentment from the large number of Roger’s works, see him sitting peacefully on the shore, the regular rhythm of the sea matching the rhythm of his hand and glass moving carefully over the wood, the small plume of smoke. He controls the sunlight like a rider controls a great big racehorse, man against nature, man with nature. The sense of Roger’s touch is always everywhere in his objects - calling them ‘work’ sounds pedestrian. Touch of sun, of sea, of fire.
Chance encounters in the wild with things that will become his substrates - in the gallery these will be exquisitely placed, each thing with lovely white clean airy space around it, lighting completely considered, hung in relation to the body of the audience, each gentle shadow surely cherished.
So - what is if?
