ROGER ACKLING

Like his friends and colleagues Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Ackling belongs to the generation of artists who graduated from St Martin’sSchool of Art in the 1960s with a sense of the possibility of taking artout of the studio. Sculpture, they decided, could be anything theywanted it to be: a walk though the Cairngorms, a bicycle ride throughFrance, or in Ackling’s case, a small piece of found wood marked by thesun. For the past 35 years, Ackling made all of his work by the samemethod: focusing sunlight through a hand held magnifying glass to drawonto pieces of discarded wood or scraps of card which he rescues fromthe edges of our everyday lives. It is an intense and meditativeprocess; each mark, like a tiny sun, measuring the existence of a ray oflight on its passage to earth from a source many millions of milesaway. The resulting works have a weight and strength and sombrestillness which belies their often small scale and everyday origins.They have the power to transform the environment that they inhabit:making quiet interventions that subtly alter the space around them.Ackling’s work urges a renewed awareness of the small, the silent, themarginal, the overlooked.