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Roger
Ackling
Sunlight on Wood
Roger Ackling works with discarded materials: recycled
card from the backs of writing pads; fragments of wood which have been
thrown away or lost. He finds his wood on the margins, the places where
things meet: the messy marriage of town and country; river banks and sluices;
flood plains; the spill-over at the back of the beach. Skips and dumps.
Places for things we have given up on. Most of his materials come from
the beach. They get washed in as flotsam and jetsam and end up at his
door.
The pieces which he chooses have always had some previous use. Wood which
was shaped into an object by some unknown joiner, put to use and then
tossed aside. By the time Ackling finds them, among the tide-wrack and
the flies, the original artefact - chair or ladder or box - will have
fallen apart at the seams, and lain out long enough for its elements to
be chamfered smooth by the sea and the sand and to be bleached by the
wind and the salt. What they were once is anybody's guess; they have become
abstract.
Roger Ackling makes his work out of doors. He draws by focusing the sun's
rays through a small magnifying glass and burning lines on the surface
of a small piece of wood or card. He works from left to right across the
surface of the piece with the sun always at his shoulder. The lines are
photographic in its truest sense. Each mark or dot is a small black sun.
Each line is a repeat pattern of burnt sun images, scaled down many million
times. Images of the sun, that is, minus any object which intervenes between
the glass in his hand and the sun one hundred and fifty million kilometres
away; when a bird passes overhead, its shadow is captured within the burnt
sunspot. An outline blocking out the light may be as small as a bird or
as large as a cloud, but its presence registers. Each dot records the
history of the sun's ray on it's journey to the earth.
The work on wood consist of bands of horizontal lines placed to respond
to occurances on the surface of the piece; holes; knots or blemishes;
nails and stains; the last scabs of paint. The lines are drawn more closely
than on the card pieces, and take the form of blocks or diamonds, which
pay careful attention to the edges of the wood and its topography.
Sylvia Ackling
Weybourne 1996
(Extract, with revisions, from Roger Ackling 'Black Sun' 1997)
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