Greetings! I am an artist in the Pacific Northwest. My main creative pursuits are watercolor, small sculpture, and crafts. I use watercolors and also some pen and ink to illustrate scenes from fantasy books or my daily life or draw fantastical creatures. I’ve been interested in doing collections of drawings that show a process, especially mundane ones like cooking or commuting.
My small sculptures take the form of miniature dolls: about 4” tall, with wrapped wire bodies and embroidered felt clothing, as well as accessories. I am inspired by Salley Mavor’s work. She put out a how to book which I’ve followed, but I’ve started designing my own costumes and sculpting the heads of polymer clay. Recently I’ve been making characters from The Lord of the Rings for friends, but I like to make my own characters too. When I’m done, I take pictures of them around the yard or on trips. I consider the dolls works of art on their own, but each picture I take with them puts them in a different context and becomes something more. These creations invite people to see the world from a smaller perspective.
Craft is a large part of what draws me to make art: the repetition of stitches, the cut edge of paper, the blending of paints and the way lines and shapes appear to be a person. The less representative arts I practice are stitch related: bookbinding and clothes mending. They feel like creative pursuits, and I approach these with the same mindset as I do the more representative dolls or works on paper, but I wonder if less representational works would need a stronger ideological background or message to be considered art. I do think about creating appealing, eye-catching patch jobs and wearing visibly mended garments as a way to value my clothing and slow the speed of my fashion consumption, but at the same time it is quite utilitarian and when I share them it is in more of a craft accomplishment context than what I would consider an art context. . . but maybe this dichotomy is false. All three of these media are imaginative and fabricated with an attention to aesthetics and convey ideas to those who see them.
CV SYLVIE S. ACKROYD sylviesack@comcast.net (360) 701-8092 http://sylvieackroyd.com Sylvie Ackroyd Born 1999, Massachusetts Lives and works in Bellingham, WA EDUCATION 2021 Bachelor of Arts, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA (Pending) SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 2021 Fingers Crossed, B Gallery Exhibition, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 2021 Sensory Suitcases – Art & Ecology, Spark Museum, Bellingham, WA 2020 Habitats in Sound, Song for Five Zones, Mindport Exhibits, Bellingham, WA