Rebecca Ackroyd is living inside the art she’s making

Rebecca Ackroyd is at home in Berlin when we call. A home which, over the past few months, has very much transformed into a studio slash giant mould, its radiators, washing machine and other surfaces cast in layers of paper and glue, their impressions destined for an upcoming solo at Deborah Schamoni in Munich.

Ackroyd has been making sculptural works since she was a student at the Royal Academy Schools, although her practice extends into painting, drawing, installation and film. She excavates and reconstructs objects, playing with what remains and what gets lost in the process. She’s interested in memory; how stories are inherited and myths can become fact. She’s had solo shows at Ginny on Frederick in London and Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. And not to forget Plaster HQ, where in 2025 her wax sculpture of a pissing baby took up residence in the shopfront. So while casting the contents of her apartment might be a new development, the ideas around absence and memory are not.

For the launch of the ASICS GEL-VENTX Everyday, Plaster teamed up with ASICS SportStyle to explore the space where movement and creativity meet. Across a series of conversations with artists, the project looks at movement not simply as something physical, but as a catalyst for ideas, experimentation and making. Annabel Downes caught up with Ackroyd to talk about living inside your work, nocturnal Berlin, her first foray into performance, and her understanding of movement as something bound up with the trajectory of both her life and practice.

Rebecca Ackroyd: Berlin is built on a swamp, and I feel like there is real swamp energy here. It can suck you in if you let it.

Annabel Downes: So you have to build your own momentum.

RA: Yes. If you’re here and you have stuff to do, it’s a really productive place to live. Because it’s less of a financial capital, it feels like it’s much more artist-led as a city, which is exciting. There’s also a level of solitude and headspace that I get here which I found very hard in London.

AD: Is that solitude something you seek out?

RA: I think so. There’s something about Berlin in autumn, when the light changes and it gets so dark. You can be walking down a completely isolated road in central Berlin at seven in the evening and feel the history of the city.

AD: But it’s also quite a nocturnal city.

RA: Yeah, it’s a much later city, which I love. Bars just stay open until the last person leaves. If that’s five in the morning, they’ll shut at five in the morning.

AD: God, they must be patient. By eleven I’d be sweeping under people’s feet.

RA: Yeah, putting the chairs on the tables. But then the coffee shops won’t open the next morning until ten.

AD: Do you tend to get out in the mornings?

RA: There’s a park near us that I go to. I quite often just want to be in nature – I find looking at trees or birds really grounding. Especially because I’ve been using my house as a studio for the last few months, I have to get out first thing, otherwise I start to go a bit mad. Even just going for a walk gives me that separation between home and work.

AD: How’s it been working at home?

RA: Absolutely mental, but I’m almost done. I’ve been working towards a show at Deborah Schamoni in Munich. A lot of the works are relief casts of different parts of the apartment, so the space has infiltrated and seeped into what I was making. They’re these weird echoes of the apartment, but they also feel almost planetary – very domestic and very universal at the same time.

AD: How did they come about?

RA: Literally just being there on my own and thinking, “Maybe I’ll make a cast of the washing machine.” I was restricted by what I could use – I couldn’t work with anything toxic – so I developed these techniques of making direct casts with paper. It’s good to have limits sometimes; they make you think differently.

AD: You’ve almost done a lockdown project in 2026.

RA: I mean, seriously. When I’m working on a show, there’s a sort of madness anyway because you’re so in it, but normally I go home at the end of every day. This time I was actually living in it. I kept the bedroom as this very clean, sacred space, but the rest of the apartment was just chaos.

AD: Are your shows usually affected by, or a response to, the environments in which they’re made?

RA: Yes, or a different moment in my life. I can’t escape that. What I make is always affected by what’s happening to me at the time. When I think of movement, I think of it less in a literal sense and more as a kind of trajectory – having an art practice, and the way that practice is constantly shifting and moving.

AD: And what’s that like to look back on?

RA: You notice how your practice is a development of who you are. I look back to the works I was making as a student and think, “Oh God, I didn’t really know myself then.” I wouldn’t say I’m more confident now, but I know myself better and know more about what I want when I’m putting on shows. It’s a constant battle between doubt and certainty. But as you get older, you care less about what other people think.

AD: And how do you keep things moving, keep ideas developing?

RA: I feel like it comes quite naturally. I don’t endlessly do the same thing over and over again. My work exists within a world; it’s very much like world-building. And that world relates to a specific time. Looking back at different bodies of work, I’ll often remember what I was listening to while making them.

AD: What have you been listening to for the production of this show?

RA: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. I’d also read Doris Lessing’s book The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), where someone in an apartment finds a world behind the walls. I found that really interesting in relation to confinement in a domestic environment, and then opening that out into a whole world of otherness.

AD: Is your own home the only place you’ve worked like this?

RA: No, I’ve actually done a lot of work at my parents’ house in Cheltenham. Whenever I’m back in the UK, I go and see them. I’ve made films there as well.

AD: How do they feel about you using their house?

RA: They don’t mind. They’re quite happy having me poking around, although I’m going to make some of those reliefs there in the next few months, so we’ll see how they feel about everything being covered in paper and glue. I’m actually working on a performance as well.

AD: Oh, really?

RA: Yeah. I’ve been working on these stories – conversations I had with my mum and also with my aunt before she died. They’re these threads of family history and myth, stories about different women on the Scottish side of my family. I’ve been thinking about the erasure of women’s names through marriage, and then I had this idea for a performance and thought, “I’m just going to do it.”

AD: How do you feel about performing?

RA: I haven’t properly written it yet, but I’m very much committed to doing it now. I feel excited. It makes me feel alive.

AD: Have you ever done anything like that before? Did you perform as a kid?

RA: Not really. I was actually a massive introvert, so I found all that stuff quite intimidating. But one of the conversations I had with my aunt was about how she’d always wanted to be an actress, but was never allowed to be. So it taps into that. I’m doing it for her.