Roger Ackling, British artist (1947-2014), sat for hours training the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass onto pocket-sized pieces of salvaged wood.
The sun burned small dots; the scorched dots formed ordered lines. The resulting creations are exquisite miniatures: “counter, original, spare, strange” to steal a line from Romantic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty.”
Ackling was not a conventional believer but his thought, intense focus, discipline, refusal to pontificate, and sense of humor bespeak a profound respect for mystery.
“Between the Lines: The Work and Teaching of Roger Ackling” (Occasional Papers, $21), a book of personal essays, reflections, reminiscences, and photographs edited by Emma Kalkhoven, is a good place to start.
The epigraph, a quote from Ackling, runs:
“As many have for centuries I want to offer back into the world an affirmation of what is wonderful. … I work on the surface but am aware that the spirit is often hidden within like a shadow in the darkness.”
In “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin posited that there are two types of creative thinkers. The fox can juggle many different ideas; the hedgehog has one big defining idea.
Roger, his wife Sylvia asserted, was a Hedgehog.
She also described his “once red hair and cheerful whiskers.”
Students clamored to join Ackling’s tutorials during which he might read aloud some of the cherished quotes he’d gathered over the years, throw out suggestions that could seem lighthearted or even foolish, and ask (rather than answer) lots of questions: “Have you ever spent a whole day completely on your own?” was a favorite.
From his early twenties, when his sister first gave him a magnifying glass, the glass became his sole implement, and the sun — that is, light — his sole medium.
Ackling didn’t sign his works: “It has to get rid of me — I am the only thing that brings it into being — I am the magnifying glass!”
His bio consisted of one line: “1947 Born Isleworth, London.”
An admirer once suggested that the real art perhaps consisted in the wisps of smoke that sometimes arose from the piece of wood Ackling was holding: the thought delighted him.
In contrast to artists who are constantly “pushing the boundaries,” insisted Ackling, “I am always making the same work.”
He might have been making the same work; if so, it appealed to a wide range of people.
Junji Teraguchi, director of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, noted that “[T]he various components Ackling’s works hold — collecting driftwood, concentrating sunlight, working outside — give an impression close to everyday objects, and sit comfortably with Japanese people who particularly appreciate flows of time or things left unexplained.”
His works neither damaged, impinged upon, nor changed the natural world. “Such humility,” Teraguchi continued, “seemed to be a goal for Roger, not only in his work or practice, but also in his whole way of life.”
He lived for years in Norfolk, an area on the east coast of England featuring cliffs, shingle, and sea, where he could walk the beach and collect small scraps of driftwood. He chose them not so much for their beauty as for signs that they’d been used by humans and discarded.
Working always from left to right, Ackling sat, perfectly still and for hours, with the sun over his right shoulder. The resulting piece might be marked, variously, by grooves, lines, triangles, crosses, squares, grids, or diamonds. The shape of the work might be cylindrical, columnar, a cube; a flat stick, a rectangular wooden tile, a pyramid. A nail might protrude from an upper corner.
To see several of the pieces arranged against a white wall gives rise to an involuntary “Ah!”
They bespeak a tenderness, a vulnerability, a group of sublime child’s toys made by someone who to the marrow of his bones loved children (though Ackling apparently had none of his own).
They also evoke the rigor and order of a Bach fugue; the simplicity of Quaker furniture; and the shadows, rusticity, and weathered-patina imperfection treasured by, again, the Japanese.
His art speaks of landscape, time, space, the beauty of everyday objects; of the here and now and of eternity. It doesn’t make “statements”: it leads us subtly to question our ways of living, being, consuming. How do we spend our days? To what do we give our attention?
Still, Ackling resolutely refused to style himself a kind of Zen guru:
“People used to say to me ‘your work is some form of meditation.’ Well, it’s not. I now let my mind do whatever it wants to do and the enjoyable thing is that it doesn’t want to do very much. Of course, one of the things that is often not discussed in relationship to landscape is that the outside world in some ways is an outer reflection of an inner state. When they come together seems an ideal moment.”
To arrive at that ideal moment requires a lifetime of monk-like devotion.
Ackling resisted ascribing any particular meaning or purpose to his work. But before dying at age 66 from motor neurone disease, he managed to capture on wood a love letter from the universe; to burn into being a message beamed across 93 million miles.
He allowed the sun to speak.
