Her recent exhibitions, Period drama at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, and Mirror Stage – a collateral event at this year’s Venice Biennale, that closed in November – showcased works including painting, sculpture, and ready-mades with repeated, fragmentary motifs, scaled-up versions of sketches on torn paper the artist was making in her studio in Berlin, where she now lives. The works play on the trope of the mirror as both a tool for reflection and as a marker of the division between reality and image, conscious and unconscious, taking cues from Lacan’s theories of the same name. “It was something I worked on for a long time and culminated in finding a way I want to use sculpture to be an active process more akin to collage than a finite thing”, the artist explains.

Ackroyd’s Champion for The Wick is Eliza Bonham Carter, Curator and Head of the RA Schools since 2006. “I got to know Rebecca when she came to study at the Royal Academy Schools and have been a committed follower of her work ever since. Rebecca identified a rich territory of material and subject, engaging with identity, desire, and the body – particularly the female body – eroticism, fragmentation, the container and the void.

Her work was immediately notable for its strength of flavour. I recall in her second year, works comprised of rectilinear slabs of sagging resin with handle slots – like minimalist, practical, carriers of flesh. And her graduation show – a series of giant female legs – confrontational, rough-surfaced plaster that shared space with thin-cast, coloured, resin boxes.

That show was orchestrated with great attention, and since Rebecca has become a master choreographer of exhibitions, extending, complicating and reimagining her realm through improvisation and precision, narrative and abstraction, most recently, in Mirror Stage, a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. She is a formidable artist, and fabulous company, like her work she is witty, informed, curious and always surprising.”

Ackroyd – who has also appeared on the cover of Flash Art this year – tells The Wick:“I draw inspiration from many places – from personal accounts of family history, thinking about the way a life is pieced together from fragments of memory.” Cinema is also a key source, but not in the way you might think: “I look at contact sheets thinking about building narrative from one scene to the next and using that in relation to building narrative between objects/images and creating installations that have a cinematic or stage-like atmosphere trying to translate the aliveness of moving image into a sculpture or image.” Other conceptual lynchpins of late for Ackroyd’s rapturous works come from spiritualist artists, and “Jungian ideas around the unconscious – using drawing as a conduit for the spiritual or unconscious.”

Currently Ackroyd is working towards a special exhibition that will take place in May next year, Tage und Nächte – at the storied Cabernet Voltaire, known as the birthplace of Dada, in Zurich. The exhibition finds connections between the analyst and wife of C.G Jung, Emma Jung, and her explorations of the human psyche and Ackroyd’s dreamlike, meditative installations, and their meandering through binaries, oppositions and the uncanny. A new series of drawings will be presented at the show, smaller in scale and expressing symbolic orders.