Like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, Ackling belongs to the generation at St. Martin’s School of Art, which in the nineteensixties started to carry art deliberately into the outdoors. Sculpture could be anything: a walk, a cycle tour, or – in Ackling’s case – a small piece of found wood, marked by the sun. For the last thirty years the artist has stayed true to his practice: he focuses sunlight through a magnifying glass and thus draws on leftover wood and cardboard collected from the margins of our everyday. This remains an intensive and meditative process; every mark measures the existence of a ray of light like a little sun and its journey to Earth from an unimaginably distant light source. The works are full of weight, power and a dark stillness that is often surprising in view of their small dimensions.