Artist: Eve Ackroyd

Workplace presents Upon A Tide a solo exhibition of new works by London based artist Eve Ackroyd.

Ackroyd’s new series of intimate portraits capture a year in the life of a family. Exploring the tensions and quiet strangeness of adolescence alongside the challenges of parenthood, the works offer a tender glimpse into the shifting dynamics of familial relationships, making visible the subtle transformations that occur as individuals and relationships grow, adjust and take on new forms.

Through her distinctive visual language, Ackroyd explores the intricate emotional terrain of the familial unit, a subject both intimately familiar and endlessly nuanced. A sense of cool indifference pervades these paintings, yet beneath the surface underlying tensions hint at forces outside of the frame: echoes of lockdown, global crises, and the pressures on healthcare and educational institutions. These external realities subtly infuse even the most private moments of daily life.

Rendered in luminous, soft-edged fields of colour, Ackroyd’s figures emerge in poses that are simultaneously contemplative, beguiling, and imbued with a sense of ennui. There is an uncanny, magnetic stillness to the works, where each gesture and glance is charged with latent emotion. Her subjects are at once anonymous and deeply personal, composites drawn from her own experience, memory, and research that reflect the delicate interplay between the personal and the world at large.