Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey (b. 1959/1959 England) are internationally acclaimed for creating a multi-disciplinary practice that intersects art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology and history. Full of references to memory and time, nature and culture, and climate breakdown, their time-based work reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event. Their artworks often evolve through extended research in response to people and place, interfacing their profound interest in local ecologies and global environmental concerns with emerging socio-political paradigms.
In 2016 the artists created a series of public artworks for the opening of the David Attenborough Building, including Seeing Red..Overdrawn, Conflicted Seeds and Spirits, and Into the Blue. They also developed two permanent exterior slate features for the building, Slate Wall East at the Corn Exchange entrance, and Slate Wall South at the end of the Museum of Zoology’s Whale Hall. Two works hang in the David Attenborough Building, an overwritten section of Seeing Red..Overdrawn, and Penny Pangolin, a sculptural piece that grew from conversations Ackroyd & Harvey held with IUCN and other specialist researchers about the decline of pangolins because of the trade in their scales.
Ackroyd & Harvey have received many awards for their work including the Royal Academy Rose Award, Wu Guanzhong Prize for Art & Innovation, NESTA Pioneer Award and Wellcome Trust Sci-Art Award for their photographic photosynthesis work, and exhibited worldwide including at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas; Colomboscope, Sri Lanka; ARoS Triennial, Denmark; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Le Centquatre-Paris, France; Festival Images, Switzerland; Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA; and Mostra SESC des Artes, Brazil.
