Curated by Bill Woodrow
Roger Ackling
Untitled 2003
© the artist
The paper has then been crumpled by hand and is displayed slightly unfolded so that we can see the parallel lines through the folds and undulations of the crumpled paper.
The simple act of crumpling the paper turns it from a flat and conventional ink-on-paper drawing, into a three-dimensional miniature landscape.
The message, and the landscape of lines, though partially obscured by the crumpling process, indicates again that the creative act of producing a drawing does not have to be about reproducing a sunlit scene or subject. Here, light is used in another way to investigate and demonstrate the often overlooked texture of a crumpled paper surface.
Read more @ TATE
By Paul Carey-Kent · April 5, 2012
Art News, London : Featured
Roger Ackling, High Noon
The best show in London now is the exemplary Boetti survey at Tate Modern (to 27 May) and it has two very worthwhile pendants: three floors (used for the first time) of neatly complementary works at Spruth Magers (to 31 March) and Gavin Turk’s homage at Ben Brown (to 20 April). Another fine group of three shows are spread across the two Lisson spaces: Dan Graham’s pavilions, Jorinde Voigt’s striking full UK debut (see my New York recommendations) and a particularly inventive set of explorations by Spencer Finch (all three to 28 April). Once you’ve seen those six (!), I also recommend the following, which similarly fail to feature paintings… the late Dubuffet show at Waddington would be my choice for those who want some.
[...]
For forty years Roger Ackling born (1947) has been using a magnifying glass to burn the sun into geometric patterns on found items or pieces of wood. Thus, ritualistic process meets minimalist language to produce altered readymades which take art out of the studio to interact with the environment. The results are harmonious, surprisingly varied, and bring a certain wit to the deconstruction of objects’ original purposes, for what is of lasting use in the context of the solar time which is inscribed by the sun’s path? So Ackling starts with a boyhood game and turns it by sheer persistence into his own route to eternity.
Read more @ Saatchi Online
Source: The List (Issue 693)
Date: 3 February 2012
Written by: Allan Radcliffe
What was the first exhibition you went to see?
Something at the Wallace Collection, London. Maybe Brueghel.
What was your first paid job as an artist?
Part time teaching at Wimbledon School of Art.
What kind of music do you listen to while you’re working?
Birdsong.
What are the best things about opening nights?
Seeing friends. A glass of wine.
Do you read reviews of your work?
Yes.
Which living artist should be better known than they currently are?
David Blackaller.
What has been your career highlight to date?
Making the work quietly by myself across the surface of the earth.
What is your favourite work of art?
Anything by Enku (17th century Japanese Buddhist monk and sculptor).
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Keep going, take it easy, but take it.
Read more @ The List
Luke Fowler | Roger Ackling | Andrew Miller | Barry McGlashan | Alistair Grant
By DUNCAN MACMILLAN
Published on Thursday 23 February 2012
There is a difference between simple and elementary, and while he occasionally lands on the right side, Luke Fowler’s playing with RD Laing’s concept of the divided self more often than not misses the mark, discovers Duncan Macmillan ONE of the first rules of contemporary art is take yourself very seriously indeed. If you do, others will too, no matter how fatuous your art may actually be. Luke Fowler at Inverleith House helps demonstrate this rule. There’s no doubt he takes himself very seriously. He expects us to do the same and, indeed, some of his show is pretty fatuous. He makes films, and my own second rule of contemporary art is that artists shouldn’t make films. Film is a sophisticated medium and any artist approaching it is bound to be a tyro. Up to a point Fowler is an exception to that rule. He does have some skill and it is not the two- hour film, All Divided Selves, in his show that is really fatuous, but I still mistrust this way of using the medium. .
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If it once seemed that madness and genius were akin, now we are quite specific in the mental disorder we most favour. It is obsessive compulsive behaviour. A good example is Roger Ackling at the Ingleby Gallery. He has taken everything from his garden shed, the forks and spades, the rakes and the hammers, even the old tomato boxes, and has apparently used a magnifying glass, following the sun to burn rows and rows of close packed parallel lines along their wooden handles and flat surfaces. Implicitly their sequence measures the cycle of the sun’s annual trajectory in a sort of fiery calendar. He has also pinned a black thread along the wall to suggest the horizon against which that trajectory is measured. But what about the weather? A burning glass needs sunshine. There are never so many sunny days in any British year. That thought casts a doubt on his whole project.
Nevertheless, the garden tools make a charming spectacle arrayed along the pristine white walls of the gallery. The suggestion of the sun’s movement is nicely apposite to gardening too, but such gentle metaphors are really upstaged by the evidence they also offer of his obsessive application to his task.
Showing alongside Ackling is Andrew Miller, an artist who recycles the things we discard and turns them into art. He makes a sculpture out of a tower of lampshades and an abstract picture out of a piece of patterned vinyl, for instance. He does it all with a certain charm, but it is scarcely an original idea. His photographs are more intriguing – a tree trunk with “no future” written on it, or a ramshackle house in Jamaica with an exactly matching chicken house alongside.
Roger Ackling is introduced as a friend and contemporary of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, both artists who make, or have made art, by taking a walk. At the Open Eye Barry McGlashan is also a walking artist, but he is a painter. For him, the walk is not the art but an opportunity. He takes his backpack and sets off, but the results are not so much about him or even a record of what he has seen, as just an opportunity for inspiration. His pictures like Drifter, for instance, a man and his dog in a desert, are unpretentious and often humorous, but they have the ring of truth. Alistair Grant, in Eye2, was teacher of printmaking at the Royal College for 35 years until he retired in 1990. He was brought up in France and so his etchings made in the 1950s of children playing in the streets or on the beach at Le Touquet are not the usual artist-on-his-foreign-holiday kind of thing, but observations of life as it is lived. They are quite brilliantly alive and informal, but taste changed and he became an abstract artist. The abstract prints he produced in the 1960s now look sadly dated, but his etchings of children are as fresh as the day they were made.
Read more @ scotsman.com
A wide variety of sculptural works will be seen across the city this summer both in galleries and public spaces. Alongside the sculptural forms of Hesse, McCracken and the Wilson Twins, works by a range of international artists, many commissioned especially for exhibitions within the Festival, will be unveiled. ... At the National Museum of Scotland Ballast: Bringing the Stones Home will see New Zealand artist, John Edgar create a series of works from stone collected in various historic quarries across Scotland. His sculptures explore the experience of the emigrant: the leaving of a homeland, the voyage through unknown seas, the arrival in a new land. Also working in wood like Andrew Ranville, but on a much smaller scale is Roger Ackling. One of the generation of artists graduating from St Martin’s in the 1960s, Ackling was part of the movement that decided sculpture could be anything they wanted it to be. In Ackling's case this is a small piece of found wood marked by the sun. Focusing sunlight through a hand held magnifying glass to draw onto pieces of discarded wood rescued from the edges of our everyday lives, Ackling, who will show work at sleeper, effectively draws with light.
Read more @ ArtDaily
By MICHAEL BRENSON Published: June 09, 1989
By the time Romare Bearden died last year, he had received the National Medal of Arts, he had been given several traveling museum shows and he had acquired countless admirers and friends. Yet within the New York art establishment, he remained an outsider. Major New York museums bought and occasionally showed his work, but his magical narrative epics remained peripheral to their concerns.
[...]
This is the first New York exhibition for Roger Ackling, an Englishman based in London who makes small delicate reliefs. He finds pieces of light wood, like driftwood. Then, using a hand-held magnifying glass, he allows the sun's rays to brand the wood in rows or stripes that sometimes move with and sometimes against the grain. Pieces of wire and nails found in the wood remain, and since they are black, they seem extensions of the lines. The charring paradoxically makes the discarded wood seem valuable. The sun seems to have squeezed it, creating the sense that there is something valuable inside. The contemplation and discipline involved in the selection and charring suggest a religious process that transforms the wood into sacred batteries or texts. Part of what is distinct about these works is that, like the striped paintings of Agnes Martin, they put no pressure on the viewer. They are simply and quite wonderfully there.
Read more @ The New York Times
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