Jane Ackroyd
Jane Ackroyd is a sculptor who specialises in both figurative and abstract constructed steel sculpture. Born in London, she gained a first class honours degree from St Martin's School of Art in 1979 and then went on to do her MA at the Royal College of Art. There she won the Special Melchett Award for Work in Steel, the Fulham Pottery Award, and also a travel scholarship to Carrara, Italy in 1983. In 1995 the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York gave her an award.
Since then, she has forged a successful career with numerous public and private commissions, and her work can be found in private collections in the US, France and Switzerland as well as the UK. She has been Artist in Residence in several schools and in 1992 collaborated closely with Levitt Bernstein Architects and the local children to design and produce exciting railings and gates for the new development of the Old Royal Free Hospital site in Islington. This was subsequently awarded the Europa Nostra Prize.
Her work tends to be of animal subject matter, however, the pieces can sometimes 'hover' on the edge of abstraction. Space and line are as important and as positive an element as the material itself. These sculptures are in steel and occasionally cast into bronze, and range from a 60cm cricket to a larger than life wildebeest containing over a ton of steel! It is not her aim to produce a simple representation of an animal but to use all the insights of abstraction to capture the essence of the animal in line and space. She also produces abstracts and this crossover between the two is a testament to her skills.
