(b 1984United Kingdom. Lives and works in London)
Ackroyd’s paintings depict women in intimate domestic settings, exploring the contradictions and ambiguities of female desire through the seductive and awkward ways their bodies inhabit their surroundings. In her collages, she creates figurative forms by intuitively cutting various ‘bodies’ out of painted paper, then assembles them together with the remaining pieces of paper. The tension between deliberation and intuition is at the heart of this process, as accidental shapes emerge and disrupt the pictorial frame, evoking the difference that can exist between what a woman does and what she actually desires.
Much of her personal iconography is formed from childhood memories of her mother and aunts: 80s hairstyles, costume jewellery, painted fingernails and hands that dance around the body and suggest narratives of seduction and obstruction. Her characters flit between different roles, such as mother, performer or introvert, and aim to capture longing in all its guises, including passivity, the suppression of desire, or compulsive sets of routines designed to detract from desire itself.
