MORAG MACINNES investigates Roger Ackling’s recent work on Orkney

Voewood 2007 (photo - © Annely Juda Fine Art)

THIS EXHIBITION could have been a curator’s nightmare. There are so many pieces. Many are small. They are titled by number and material – ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with wire’, ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood’ – rather than having tricksy names which might divert and direct the viewer.

They are without exception monochrome, natural colours, apart from a Mexican orange box with faded red lettering and a few still jaunty naïve depictions of fruit and veg on the side.

However Ackling, who knows the Pier space, having been here last year, made his installation here, according to staff, in a calm and almost Zen-like manner, with hardly any rethinks. He knew what should go where. His relationship with the gallery dates from an acquisition of four works in 2006, which counterpoint the original Margaret Gardiner collection, allowing us to see old in new, and new in old.

He is one of those 60s St Martin’s graduates who turned things around a bit, and from whose influence younger artists may struggle to emerge, so confident was their way of looking at nature, found objects, and what happens when you put things in unexpected places – Richard Long and Hamish Fulton were contemporaries.

Over forty years he has developed a painstaking, completely time-tide-and-light-bound way of working. He uses a microscope to burn holes in wood, or paper, working from left to right. This burning is all done in one take, it seems – if the sun goes in, the work stops. It’s best, it seems, to work in the afternoon – things can go up in flames if the beam is too intense. He’s been developing this technique for forty years. He works on location or at his Norfolk home.

“I’ve got a dot, which is an image of the sun… a dot and a dot builds into a line. It’s not now about the dot and the line, but where you start and where you stop… I’m drawing with light.”

Orcadian light held up to the technique, thank goodness: Ackling talks of his interest in how our local industry (or perhaps the demise of some of it?) is reflected in the debris he beachcombs and rescues, and also of the wind and wave power which renders wood “sand blasted, battered, slowly smoothed away.”

Gallery 1 in the Pier is a long thin corridor, rather like a voe, given light and strong verticals by the long slim windows. Outside the window, where the working piers have railing sand masts, there are more. The rain is also runneling down the glass in straight lines.

The series of works opposite echo these lines, and also the muted ochre of the flagstones outside. These Voewoods, with their regular, close, mathematically precise burnt lines, look like ancient Japanese musical instruments, clappers and spiral combs – or units of measurement.

They look African, too – votive offerings, things made to propitiate something. But look closer and you see why the exhibition is called Brought Back – this is about material which has been tossed away, its original purpose lost in the ocean or the back garden of a croft.

Ackling brings them back, intervening, rearranging, playing sometimes with empty space (blackened rectangles where slats once were) or with weathered paint – so they become something new and yet ancient, full of history. It’s a work of artistic reclamation, and also imitation. The salt which has rusted these old nails, the shape and state of the old wood, all pulled together by Ackling’s own version of the effect of hundreds of years of light – his burning glass.

I’m intrigued. These woods are like deconstructed fishboxes. It’s hard to find wood in Orkney on beaches now – plastic rules, and the days of boxes with legends like Buckie, Aberdeen, or Stavanger burnt into them are over.

An artist’s intervention to give plastic a history would be challenging, because it wears away so smoothly. Wood is like Rembrandt’s face in the self -portraits – it carries stories. Perhaps it’s because the beach isn’t as wood littered that this man hunts for it – the works are about honouring it in a new way.

As we proceed through Gallery 2 the objects change. They’re more block-like, and also more like domestic detritus. Here’s something like an old doorstop. Here’s a triangle like a Sphinx – all whorled by burn marks – and a door knob with a pin in it, which manages to look sleek and much turned, but also, from above, like a pattern in a sand garden.

The pin, I think, also has to do with dots and circles. Circles recur in a hypnotic kind of way. There’s a trapezoid block with an Aztec-like sun and a mysterious squat kind of presence to it. I begin to think up metaphors and images – it’s impossible not to. The artist however – while I’m sure he’d allow this – says, “I don’t need to have symbolism to give something presence… a motif… holds in condensed form… something which was very simple… but actually loaded with complexity and emotional intent.”

You really want to finger these things, feel the textures.

The big Room 3 can be a puzzle for some installations – it’s high and echoing, and a daunting space where work as muted as this (“I’m not interested in colour – only in light and dark,” he said) could get lost. But ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with metal’ holds its own. We’re in the croft now – this has been an ancient bucket handle with a worn wooden handle. Set sideways, it resembles the mandibles of some big insect.

Here size jumps around and tricks us – a big spar becomes an enormous pencil, or possibly a rocket, about to hit the ground. I see carpenters’ tools, spirit levels – because the burnings now shine like brass. This is a room about work – things forgotten that can have new meanings.

It’s a bit like writing the History of a Penny when you were in Primary, looking in here. You want to work out the journey they’ve taken to be here. I’m perplexed by my familiarity with a strange 20 cm wood and burn handle, with a twist of iron on the top – again, a bit insect-like. Is it a dentist’s tool? Three hours later I remember – it’s the remains of a washing up mop, the sort with a string head.

Right across from the door, all alone on a vast wall, off centre, is ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with string’. Up close, after all the monochrome, and burnt string effects, this stuff is a surprise and a pleasure. It’s like a bit of old pulley rope that’s been in the sea for years. The scarcity of soft textures means you really pay attention when there are some.

Move further back and suddenly it’s like a crucifix. The lights in this room give each work three shadows – from some angles they’re fan-like, or feather-like. Farmers’ lives are here too – rusty fence staples are transformed into vertical handholds. A rectangle of wooden slats is Doric temple, a washboard, a series of lights and darks in an abstract pattern – whatever you like.

Room 4 and there are my boxes, all intact. The burnt lines echo the workmanship and play with the linearity of the shapes. The wood is of different quality – rickety or tough – but they’ve all travelled, from Mexico, Italy, France, still bearing ancient slogans on their sides. Taylor’s Bulbs box (Ackling has a nice sense of hidden humour) may have come less far and contained less exotic things, but it’s stout and solemn, as befits a receptacle bearing something which would grace someone’s garden.

In the corner, two rectangular boxes arranged like speakers, positioned so you can see light streaming through the holes. This is the room with the view of the harbour, and the colours and lines once again inhabit the outside scene – shadows, light, circles, squares. The calm in this room is irresistible – and there’s mystery amongst the ordinary.

One box says – DE GEUS DEIL. It barely needs the artist’s intervention – but it’s there, very subtly. The length of time these burnings have taken, and the precision with which they are executed, and the differing textures he achieves – burns like wool, like rope, like onion rings, like iron, like cat gut – has to be seen to be understood. For such a limited sounding discipline to set yourself, it’s amazingly versatile.

Room 5 always has a long low brooding presence to it, I think. Here is a venerable kirn lid, perhaps, warped and holes – with a diamond burnt into it. It’s a shield, for me; someone else might just enjoy the physicality of the strong shapes. A fishbox – like a radiator! A dice! A wooden tiny tower block!

‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with nail’, and ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with elastic band’ are placed on window sills, and rightly so – both accept the view outside, the circular holes mirror the car headlights and lifebuoys on the pier beyond.

Finally the intimate Room 6 has a different atmosphere. Six of the seven works are sunlight on masking tape on card. The card, grained grey rectangles, occasionally with punch holes like a student notebook, is covered with beautifully precise burnt strips. Lines and circles, and the scorched edges of the yellow paper, make these feel like sunlight. They have a warmth, lightness, which contrasts with the woodwork. It’s like having a sorbet after steak.

There’s long term engagement here with forgotten things, and with time and the effects of attrition, be it sun, sea or wind. It’s fitting that this should be seen by Orcadians first. Leave the last word to the artist, from the Pier’s Gallery catalogue:

“I work outside on the ground and under the sky… thoughts are reduced to a minimum… what is made from the simple concentrated ritual is held within the work itself… like many others for thousands of years I believe that insight can be seen and rekindled through a pragmatic dialogue with material.’

He’s right. But I can’t help wondering about the back history of every piece, and imagining its reinvention as something quite other. Perhaps that’s what Brought Back is all about

© Morag MacInnes, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre