ARTIST

Rebecca Ackroyd (b. 1987, UK) lives and works between Berlin and London. 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. Through an exposed kneecap, a torn stocking, or a glimpse of talons, her recent works create a sensory reality that straddles the imagined real and symbolic, borrowing from the destabilizing surreal visual language of dreams. 

As viewers, we trespass into Ackroyd’s own dreams, invited to appropriate them as our own. In so doing, works such as Ladder, assemble a contemporary feminine perspective on sexuality, desire and the subconscious.

CHARITY

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 refuge in Chiswick, West London, in 1971. Since then, it has grown to become the country’s largest single provider of specialist support to women and children escaping domestic abuse and other forms of gender-based violence. On any given day, Refuge supports more than 7,000 women and children.

Refuge’s national network of specialist services includes safe emergency accommodation through refuges in secret locations across the country; community-based outreach services; culturally specific services for women from South Asian, African and Caribbean, Middle Eastern, Eastern European and Vietnamese backgrounds; a modern slavery service; independent advocacy services for women at the highest risk of serious injury and homicide; 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.

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Registered charity number 277424.
A company limited by guarantee 1412276.