Rebecca Ackroyd: don’t ask why, you’ll spoil everything

I first see Rebecca Ackroyd – well, a fragment of her – through a slit in a red curtain. It’s a screen of knotted bandanas which will encircle the centrepiece of her Plaster Store takeover with jewellery brand, Fervent Moon. 

An hour later, I find her baptising said centrepiece – a statue of a small boy pissing into a chamber pot – in molten beeswax. I have a lot of questions, and fortunately, it’s time for the interview. We station ourselves at the back of the store – it’s dark, save for theatrical shards of light cast through the curtain. “It’s quite David Lynch”, she says. 

Rebecca was born in Cheltenham, UK in 1987. Both her parents were doctors; I ask if she thinks this detail had any bearing on the bodily forms that have come to define her sculptures. “Weirdly, I have a bit of a phobia of the insides of the body,” she says. Many of Rebecca’s most recognisable works – like those depicting fragments of translucent limbs or chairs in rhythmic sequences – seem entirely devoid of insides. They’re not, but Rebecca won’t tell you, explicitly at least, what’s inside, it’s up to you to fill the space. “I don’t really like to say why I’ve done anything directly, because quite often I don’t know what I’m doing. And I like that,” she says. “The older I get and the more shows I do, the more I don’t want to talk about it.”

Rebecca is interested in memory – how stories are inherited and myths can become fact. She recounts one such tale of her great grandmother, who, as the story goes, had hair down to the floor and wore it in a gigantic knot above her head. When she went into a care home, they cut it all off, and she never spoke again. Hair is a recurring symbol in Rebecca’s work; in her paintings it’s vortexes, swirls, threads and knots. In her sculptures, it’s more literal. 

Her current show at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (on until 30th November), is a dialogue with Swiss psychoanalyst Emma Jung (1882–1955). Rebecca’s research involved visiting the Jungs’ former home and archive on lake Zurich, meeting their descendants and even undergoing analysis herself. Like Rebecca, Emma’s interests lay in the concept of the individual, the fragmented self and the fragility of memory. “I love the idea of the collective unconscious, and archetypes – how symbolism affects all of us in completely different ways and feeds into our dreams,” she says. For the first time, Rebecca turned to wax as a sculptural material. “There’s a feeling that wax can have multiple lives.”

So that brings us back to the wax sculpture of a pissing baby in the shopfront of Plaster HQ. Those familiar with Brussels vernacular may already know the history of the Mannekin Pis monument: a 17th-century bronze trickster credited with everything from extinguishing city fires to pissing on enemy troops. The Manneken Pis first entered Ackroyd’s life in a charity shop in Norway. He became the protagonist of her 2023 show, ‘Period Drama’ at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, and played another role in her much-acclaimed show, ‘Mirror Stage’, coinciding with the 2024 Venice Biennale. In both, the boy – a fragmented, luminous resin replica of him – posed puckishly on a mirror supported by a bed of water bottles filled with what was logically urine, but could also have been extra virgin olive oil. “I liked them as bad actors, like Bacchus drinking wine and the Manneken Pis pissing on people’s heads. Then there are the adult female figures kind of grounding everything, surrounded by these little terrors,” she says.

These days, Rebecca is based mostly in Berlin, but over the summer, returned to the “big old house” in Cheltenham where she grew up. It was here, “confronted by different versions of myself”, that she developed work for ‘The Privy Window’, at London’s Ginny on Frederick, in which the Manneken Pis also featured. On the pub-like floral carpet were a variety of small-scale wax figurines – angels, cherubs, milkmaids – based on trinkets the artist found on Ebay and in garden centres – posed in antique chamber pots. Mischievous, unruly, kitsch, yes, but also the conduit between purity and impurity, desire and disgust; the spiritual ‘up there’ and the temporal ‘below’. On slide projections were images of familiar yet unfathomable things, like outer space and, perhaps uncharacteristically, the insides of the body. “I don’t always know what drives an idea. I just tend to pull at the string and it takes me somewhere,” says Rebecca. “It’s important to take risks, I think, and not have answers.”

For the Plaster Store takeover, Rebecca worked with her longtime friend, Lewis Teague-Wright. They met while studying at the Byam Shaw School of Art (now absorbed into Central Saint Martins) 20 years ago. Lewis, also an artist, founded Fervent Moon in 2007 as an online music platform. This summer, he launched his first jewellery collection, which “grew out of a desire to make something tangible, to give form to feeling,” he says. “The aim is for Fervent Moon to straddle between a jewellery brand and a cultural project; something that can live in galleries as easily as on a wrist or neck.” 

 The sculpture is wearing a silver pendant of itself; perhaps even the pendant version is wearing another version, who knows. Surrounding him, the blood red bandanas featuring a design that reworks two of Ackroyd’s drawings from her Zurich show: one depicts a POV dream in which a figure pees in a tiled toilet cubicle (“I often have a peeing dream when I’m going through big change”, she says.) Another is a repeated motif of a sheep’s skull. The images are surrounded by spiralling vortexes. 

But here, in Soho, The Mannekin Pis can be whoever you want him to be. He has another chance to reinvent himself. For Lewis, he’s “a deranged baby Jesus for all the Christmas shoppers descending on Soho.” For Rebecca, he is the embodiment of how monuments and statues, like memories, can be warped and altered, some even end up as kitsch replicas in charity shops.

So come and pay your respects to the Mannekin Pis – ponder who he is, how he was made, what he stands for, where he came from. Just don’t ask why, you’ll ruin everything.