Hair tells stories. Like rings on a tree, it records our personal histories as the physical embodiment of time. Simultaneously, hair is socially charged: if and how it’s coiffed, shown or covered, worn curly or straight. Ackroyd’s works on paper are often centered around hair. It sweeps through the composition to camouflage or cradle objects, letters and other signifiers, with an agency of its own. These clues lead us through a narrative centered around contemporary experiences of femininity within urban spaces. The drawings are fragments, the whole is obscured, the body is abstracted through scale and repetition, becoming both bodily and speculative. Ackroyd’s sculptural works are also often fragmented, resembling remnants uncovered in archaeological digs. Both act as filaments connecting histories and loaded objects, populating the gallery space with discarded and forgotten attachments of the past. Through an exposed kneecap, a torn stocking, or a glimpse of talons, the works in the exhibition create a sensory reality that straddles the imagined real and symbolic, borrowing from the destabilizing surreal visual language of dreams. As viewers, we trespass into Ackroyd’s own dreams, invited to appropriate them as our own. In so doing, the works assemble a contemporary feminine perspective on sexuality, desire and the subconscious.

100mph sensitively reflects on themes of sexuality, narratives of progress, our built environments, and the subconscious mind. Setting together conflicting momentums of extended and suspended time – the mind racing, but going nowhere. An entangled mixture of social commentary and personal reflection, posited to the viewer as a circuit through the process of renovation, and the repair and wreckage that entails.