Eve Ackroyd

(b 1984, United Kingdom. Lives and works in London)

Ackroyd's paintings depict women in intimate domestic settings; exploring the contradictions and ambiguities of female desire through the seductive and awkward ways their bodies inhabit their surroundings. In her collages; she creates figurative forms by intuitively cutting various ”˜bodies' out of painted paper; then assembles them together with the remaining pieces of paper. The tension between deliberation and intuition is at the heart of this process; as accidental shapes emerge and disrupt the pictorial frame; evoking the difference that can exist between what a woman does and what she actually desires. Much of her personal iconography is formed from childhood memories of her mother and aunts: 80s hairstyles; costume jewellery; painted fingernails and hands that dance around the body and suggest narratives of seduction and obstruction. Her characters flit between different roles; such as mother; performer or introvert; and aim to capture longing in all its guises; including passivity; the suppression of desire; or compulsive sets of routines designed to detract from desire itself.