Elaine Shemilt


Elaine Shemilt is a British artist and researcher especially known as a fine art printmaker.
Her work does not take a conventional approach to the medium and ranges across a wide variety of media. According to the art historian and theorist Alan Woods: "Her work initially focused on installation, the various printmaking media were used in an attempt to continue and develop the installations by other means. If the event is inevitably lost, a new artwork is launched from it, and as themes and subjects occur and re-occur, their re-generation might usefully be imagined as located within an extended family of images."

Biography

Between 1960 and 1972, Shemilt grew up in Craigavad, County Down in Northern Ireland. She attended non-denominational Bloomfield Collegiate School and Victoria College, Belfast during The Troubles where her experiences motivated her to develop the themes of conflict, censorship and psychological constraint in her work.
Shemilt is a graduate of the Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited internationally including in Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada, USA, Australia, Italy and Germany. In Britain she has exhibited at the Hayward Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and at the Edinburgh Festival. She was a pioneer of early feminist video and multi-media installation work alongside her fellow artist and friend Helen Chadwick, who selected her for the Hayward Annual in 1979. Of her early video works, only two have survived: Doppelgänger,, and Women Soldiers, which were recovered and remastered by the REWIND video art project in 2011.
Shemilt established the printmaking department of the School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 1988 and was course director of printmaking from 1988-2001. She is currently professor of fine art printmaking and a professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists and was its president from March 2007 until 2010. Shemilt was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2000 and of the Royal Geographical Society in 2009. She has collaborated with the video artist Stephen Partridge on several installations, including "Rush", first exhibited at London's Fieldgate Gallery, and "Quattro Minuti di Mezzogiorno", a HiDefinition video installation, exhibited in Italy in December 2010-January 2011.

South Georgia

In 2002 she was made a Shackleton Scholar and was awarded a Carnegie Scholarship. She is a trustee and vice chair of the South Georgia Heritage Trust established to promote the environmental protection and habitat restoration of South Georgia Island, a natural wilderness in the Southern Atlantic.
In 1998 Shemilt was invited to lead a project to improve the environment of the military base on the Falkland Isles by the then commander, Brigadier David Nicholls. The experiences of the staff and student team she put together led inevitably, to independent artworks by all. Four years later in 2002 this led to the exhibition, "Traces of Conflict, The Falklands Revisited 1982-2002" at the Imperial War Museum. Shemilt's work in this exhibition was inspired by the abandoned field hospital at Ajax Bay, and according to the Imperial War Museum Keeper Angela Weight, Shemilt "was gripped by the aura of a place where the writ of war did not run and young men were tended irrespective of whether they were friend or foe."

Art and science

An important strand of her work involves collaboration between art and science. Her work with the Genome Diagram developed by Dr Ian Toth and Dr Leighton Pritchard at the Scottish Crop Research Institute resulted in a portfolio of work including installations, digital animation, prints and music.
In 2013 Shemilt completed a major SciArt commission for the University of Dundee College of Life Science's new Centre for Translational & Interdisciplinary Research building: The Scales of Life which embodies science and the visualisation process. She collaborated with the Regius Professor Michael Ferguson and the architect Jo White. On three facades of the CTIR building, 16 columns of large metal cladding panels incorporate her artistic abstractions which represent the four key scales of life: Molecular, Organellar, Cellular and Tissue. The cladding panels are made from a high quality anodised aluminium and are arranged vertically into groups of four panels. The panels address the essence of the four main scales of life and the intangibility of their size and dimensions. The visual abstractions reflect both an interpretive aesthetic approach, and the need to retain scientific recognition and accuracy. The main objective of the work is that the series of images reflect in a meaningful way the scientific research being undertaken within the CTIR building. The CTIR was officially opened by Sir Paul Nurse on 1 October 2014.

Research

In 2013 she was awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh Caledonian European Research Fellowship to study and research in Italy, and was chair of the international printmaking conference IMPACT 8 held in Dundee in August.
In 2014 she was awarded £234,872 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to act as principal investigator on the research project European Women's video art in the 70s and 80s . A publication associated with the project was published in May 2019.
Starting in March 2018 she started work as principal investigator on another AHRC-funded research project, Richard Demarco, the Italian Connection | Exchanges between Scotland and Italy through Richard Demarco in the European context - a study on the eponymous artist, animator, gallerist, and promoter of the visual and performing arts.

Exhibitions

Interest in Shemilt's early video and performance work has grown during the early 21st century. The exhibition, SHE DEVIL 8, in Rome in 2016 was described:
Shemilt was featured in Gabriel Schor's book, The Feminist Avant Garde, Art from the 1970s in 2016. In 2018. several of her works from the 1970s were acquired by the SAMMLUNG VERBUND art collection in Vienna, and her work is in a touring exhibition, "The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s", showing in Stavanger, Brno, Barcelona, and New York City.
In 2019 she and Venetian artist Federica Marangoni collaborated on "Parallel Dialogues Through Video and Time" at Venice’s Court of Casa Golden. The exhibition, curated by Laura Leuzzi and Iliyana Nedkova with the assistance of Adam Lockhart, tours to Scotland in 2020.

Academic works