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ARTS  ACTIVISM Sowing seeds for rebellion Gary Cook meets artivists Ackroyd & Harvey It is a rare talent to take the ordinary and not just make it extraordinary, but also imbue it with a powerful message. That is a trademark of multi-disciplinary artists Ackroyd & Harvey, whose special alchemy is to breathe thought-provoking beauty into the everyday. There is, after all, nothing particularly un­usual about designing a jacket, unless it is made from verdant, living grass and worn at London Fashion Week as an indictment of the uber-wasteful clothing industry. The pair seem equally able to conjure up the surreal and unexpected in other areas of their lives. While holding the barricades at the recent London Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests, Heather Ackroyd got into conversation with a tall policeman. Surprised by his apparent sympathy with their cause, she commented to him, “It sounds like you understand our aims.” Stooping down, the PC whispered, “That’s because when I’m off duty I’m a druid.” Ash to Ash (work in progress) © Ackroyd & Harvey Photograph by Madeleine Hodge 42 Resurgence & Ecologist Ackroyd & Harvey in their studio © Johnny Millar www.johnnymillar.com A significant portion of the actively alternative world Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey inhabit is being taken up with XR at the moment. They spent 11 days and nights camping at Marble Arch during the high-profile demonstration in April this year. But their involvement is really just a natural extension of what they have been energetically expressing in their creative lives for the past 40 years. Their back catalogue of installations and artworks has always focused on the environment and its destruction. They are enthused now that many more of the public have joined the movement: “In a dark place, the protests are a gleaming light.” As well as producing multi-disciplinary works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history, Ackroyd & Harvey are among the founders of the Culture Declares Emergency movement. Allied to XR, it is a group of like-minded artists and practitioners in culture making a public statement of their support for action in the face of the planetary crisis. Challenging the status quo through artistic expression is where Ackroyd & Harvey’s strength has always been. For example, their striking installation Ash to Ash at White Horse Wood, Maidstone, Kent was commissioned by The Ash Project as part of a campaign to highlight the sad predicament facing one of our most populous trees. Scientists predict that as many as 98% of Britain’s 150 million ash trees will be struck September/October 2019
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down by dieback disease in the next decade. Research by Natural England found that 1,058 different species, from beetles to birds, lichens to mammals, are dependent in some way on ash. All of them will be affected by the trees’ demise. The central pillars of Ash to Ash are two 10-metre-tall trees, one stripped of its bark, leaving a ghostly pale smooth surface, while in sharp contrast its twin is blackened by fire. The truncated limbs are carefully pierced by 10,000 arrow shafts. The artists explain: “The arrow, cleaved from ash, is integral to our artwork. Stripped of feather flight and steel head, it is impaled in its thousands into the monolith form of the two trees.” When I visited the work, the arrows created an eerie sound as the wind blowing onto the Downs filtered through their mass. At certain times of day, the light blurs their shapes, creating the sense of a soft-focus halo around the structures. Ackroyd and Harvey continue: “The two forms seem to mirror each other. One casts a dark shadow of loss. Ash to Ash is our way of inviting people to connect emotionally with the landscape, to help them find a way of mourning the loss of this tree and the way that it will change the land forever.” The Kent Downs is one of Britain’s most densely wooded landscapes, the ash tree its most common species. Recent drone footage over this iconic and apparently fertile scenery revealed the outline of thousands of ash dying within the forests, making the county the hardest hit by dieback disease so far. Ackroyd & Harvey’s caring attitude extends to other artists too. Looking to the future and thinking about the weathering of the installation, Harvey muses, “Maybe, as with dieback-stricken trees, once the artwork begins to degrade we should lay the structures down and let them crumble. The budget saved on moving them could go to support up-and-coming artists.” Their in-depth arboreal knowledge made them the obvious choice to produce Kent’s emblematic piece, as ash has been a source of inspiration for both since they were students. Ackroyd studied with the pioneering artist David Nash in 1978, just after he had planted his iconic Ash Dome installation, a ring of 22 trees planted in a secret location in North Wales and intended to stand for centuries. (The installation is now sadly affected by “The arrow, cleaved from ash, is integral to our artwork. Stripped of feather flight and steel head, it is impaled in its thousands into the monolith form of the two trees.” dieback and its future hangs in the balance.) And in the 1980s, as a young Royal College of Art student, Harvey was making arrows and sculptures from ash. The couple combined forces in the 1990s and the tree has continued to act as a muse for them ever since. Ecology is intrinsic to Ackroyd & Harvey’s textural Ash to Ash (detail), installed at White Horse Country Park © Ackroyd & Harvey Photograph © Manuel Vason Issue 316 Resurgence & Ecologist 43

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ARTS  ACTIVISM

Sowing seeds for rebellion Gary Cook meets artivists Ackroyd & Harvey

It is a rare talent to take the ordinary and not just make it extraordinary, but also imbue it with a powerful message. That is a trademark of multi-disciplinary artists Ackroyd & Harvey, whose special alchemy is to breathe thought-provoking beauty into the everyday. There is, after all, nothing particularly un­usual about designing a jacket, unless it is made from verdant, living grass and worn at London Fashion Week as an indictment of the uber-wasteful clothing industry.

The pair seem equally able to conjure up the surreal and unexpected in other areas of their lives. While holding the barricades at the recent London Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests, Heather Ackroyd got into conversation with a tall policeman. Surprised by his apparent sympathy with their cause, she commented to him, “It sounds like you understand our aims.” Stooping down, the PC whispered, “That’s because when I’m off duty I’m a druid.”

Ash to Ash (work in progress) © Ackroyd & Harvey

Photograph by Madeleine Hodge

42 Resurgence & Ecologist

Ackroyd & Harvey in their studio © Johnny Millar www.johnnymillar.com

A significant portion of the actively alternative world Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey inhabit is being taken up with XR at the moment. They spent 11 days and nights camping at Marble Arch during the high-profile demonstration in April this year. But their involvement is really just a natural extension of what they have been energetically expressing in their creative lives for the past 40 years. Their back catalogue of installations and artworks has always focused on the environment and its destruction. They are enthused now that many more of the public have joined the movement: “In a dark place, the protests are a gleaming light.”

As well as producing multi-disciplinary works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history, Ackroyd & Harvey are among the founders of the Culture Declares Emergency movement. Allied to XR, it is a group of like-minded artists and practitioners in culture making a public statement of their support for action in the face of the planetary crisis.

Challenging the status quo through artistic expression is where Ackroyd & Harvey’s strength has always been. For example, their striking installation Ash to Ash at White Horse Wood, Maidstone, Kent was commissioned by The Ash Project as part of a campaign to highlight the sad predicament facing one of our most populous trees. Scientists predict that as many as 98% of Britain’s 150 million ash trees will be struck

September/October 2019

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