Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce an exhibition of British artist Roger Ackling (1947-2014), bringing together eighteen works to survey two decades of practice. The presentation offers a focused encounter with objects made in the last decades of the artist’s life, from the 1990s until 2011, and reveals an uncompromising engagement with light, time, and landscape that remains singular within post-war British sculpture.

Over a career spanning more than forty years Ackling pursued a radical clarity of method. Using driftwood and a small handheld magnifying glass, he channelled sunlight to inscribe scorched lines onto wood and board. These deliberate acts of burning – slow, patient, devotional – revealed a process at once sculptural and photographic. Each mark emerged through the direct convergence of sun and material, creating intricate linear and geometric rhythms that registered the conditions of their making. The thickness and tone of these lines shifted with season, climate and latitude: a system of traces that map the intimacies of location.

A contemporary of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, with whom he studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art in the late 1960s, Ackling contributed to a broader movement that reimagined the locations and processes of sculpture. He worked outside the closed sphere of the studio, permitting the environment to serve as collaborator. Rather than imposing gesture, he sought to relinquish authorial control; sunlight, rather than the artist’s hand, activates and enlivens the surface. Driftwood, shaped by wind and water, provided a natural structure on which the artist inscribed these solar marks, resulting in works that are both intimate and enduring.