In Focus: Ackroyd & Harvey
Artist-activists Ackroyd & Harvey – Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey – have worked together for over three decades, delivering poignant and powerful artworks, installations and performances across the globe.
Image credit: Installation view Ackroyd & Harvey, Prima Materia, 1992, Arte Domani, Punti di Vista, Spoleto, Italy. Photo: Ackroyd & Harvey. Courtesy the artists © Ackroyd & Harvey
Artists Ackroyd & Harvey were recently announced as participants in rīvus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney planned for March 2022, across locations yet to be announced. Led by Artistic Director José Roca and curatorial team Paschal Daantos Berry (AGNSW), Anna Davis (MCA), Hannah Donnelly (I.C.E) and Talia Linz (Artspace), rīvus tasks participants with taking “rivers, wetlands, and other salt and freshwater ecosystems … dynamic, living systems with varying degrees of political agency” as the subject of their works. In the words of Barbara Moore, the Biennale’s Chief Executive Officer: “This edition of the Biennale will be all about our connections, and disconnections, with water, and as a result, with each other.”
rīvus is not the first time the British artists have worked on Australian soil. In 1996, on Whadjuk land for Perth Festival, the artists presented 89-91 Lake Street, a site-specific installation in which viewers progressed from one extreme climactic polarity (arid desert) to another (verdant grasses and sprouting trees) as they moved through the rooms of two neighbouring houses. In 2018, on Kaurna land for WOMADelaide, they presented a suite of eight monumental photographic portraits rendered in staygreen perennial ryegrass, a grass strain developed in collaboration with Dr Howard Thomas and Dr Helen Ougham at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Aberystwyth, Wales.
In Crystal Fish (2005) and Shoal (2011), the artists crystallised the skeletons of a cod and 30 small sea bream respectively. In Stranded (2006), working in close collaboration with the Cetacean Stranding Programme at London’s Natural History Museum, the artists ...Subscribe to read this article in full