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ELAINE SHEMILT Born Edinburgh, Scotland EDUCATION 1960 - 1972 1976 1979 1980 1982 1989 - to date Professional member of Scottish Society of Artists, and regular exhibitor in the Bradford Print Biennale, Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibitions, and The Society of Scottish Artists Exhibitions. EXHIBITIONS INCLUDE 1976 1978 1979 1980 1981 1984 1987 1988 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 COLLECTIONS British Broadcasting Corporation Landesbank, Stuttgart, West Germany Arts Council of Great Britain Private Collections in Europe and Canada Dundee City Museums and Art Galleries Lincoln & Humberside Arts Scottish Arts Council Southern Arts Chimera An Installation by Elaine Shemilt and Stephen Partridge Introduction Elaine Shemilt's work ranges across a wide variety of media - from printmaking to installation. The work has often centred on the body. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art was in the Hayward Annual in 1979. She has exhibited internationally including Switzerland, Denmark Amsterdam and Germany. In 1997 her exhibition Behind Appearance toured across the midwest of the USA. She is currently Senior Lecturer in charge of the Printmaking Dept of the School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, Scotland. Stephen Partridge Stephen
Partridge is a media artist and producer. He has been working creatively
with videotape since 1974. He was in the 'landmark' shows of the 1970s
including the Video Show at the Serpentine in 1975, the Installation Show
at the Tate gallery in 1976, The Paris Biennalle in 1977 and the The Kitchen
in New York in 1979. During the eighties he exhibited widely and became
interested in works for broadcast television and was commissioned by Channel
4 television to produce Dialogue for Two Players in 1984. With Jane Rigby,
he formed Fields and Frames - an arts projects and television production
company - which produced the innovative Television Interventions project
for Channel 4 in 1990, with nineteen works by artists for television including
his own work The Sounds of These Words . He co-produced a short series
of student and artists work entitled Not Necessarily with BBC Scotland
for BBC2 network television in 1991. He has also curated a number of influential
video shows: Video Art 78 ; UK TV ; National Review of Live Art (Video
Programme) from 1988-90; 19:4:90 Television Interventions ; and the touring
tape packages - Made in Scotland I, II, Semblances , and Passages. He
has lectured for twenty years in a number of art colleges, and is presently
Professor of Media Art and Head of School at one of Europe's leading colleges
for digital media, video and animation - the School of Television and
Imaging, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee, Scotland.
Elaine Shemilt Stephen Partridge
BEHIND APPEARANCE FOREWORD The first image by Elaine
Shemilt that I can remember seeing was a photograph in the catalogue of
the 1979 Hayward Annual, a yearly overview of the best in British art.
The artist's profile was distorted by being bound in strips of transparent
plastic. The photograph was in the ancillary programmes section, mainly
performance, along with Sylvia Zirenek, Charlie Hooker and Bobby Baker,
so when I next encountered Elaine's work at the Bradford Biennale, I was
surprised to find that she was a printmaker. Why should I have been surprised?
Why should printmaking and performance seem incompatible? Throughout the
history of post renaissance western art, major artists have made prints
but these have largely been seen, with drawing, as subsidiary to painting
or sculpture. In recent years several artists have pulled print from its
closet, addressing new scales and contexts, incorporating printed elements
into installation and public works, contributing to the growing currency
of the artist's book and embracing photographic and digital technologies.
Elaine Shemilt is one of those artists. Her photo-etchings record temporary
installation pieces: the photographic image of the artist's body screenprinted
life size and laid in the landscape; a glass bell-jar placed over the
face and the arrangement again photographed but developed this time as
a photo-etching. A series of visual questions are posed. What is real?
What is photographed? What is printed? Occasionally large scale installations
are exhibited using printed elements often on latex, often stretched and
distorted, mirroring that early evidence of the performance.
BEHIND APPEARANCE Article by Alan Woods
- Editor of Transcript Elaine Shemilt's work ranges across a wide variety
of media. Initially, it focused on installation, with its multiple and
unfixed viewpoints, its active involvement of the viewer's own body in
an individual journey through the work; the various printmaking media,
which have since themselves informed a number of installations, were initially
used in an attempt to continue and develop the work of the installations
by other means, rather than simply - and conventionally - record them
through photography. If the event is inevitably lost, a new art work is
launched from it, bearing a family resemblance; and, as themes and subjects
occur and re-occur through the work, their generation and regeneration
might usefully be imagined as located within an extended family of images.
The work has always centred on the body, by now an established genre of
late twentieth century art - but that context (and the accompanying commentary
within feminist and cultural studies which the genre both inspires and
illustrates) was initially lacking; this was pioneering work. An attempt
should therefore be made initially to imagine the work as distinct, in
its roots, from the obvious interpretative frameworks to which it might
appear to be naturally related. Hitherto - and this persists deep within
the layers of imagery of which the recent prints and paintings are made
up - the body pictured has been the artist's own. The ways in which this
matters or fails to matter are various, as various as the quicksilver
meanings arising from the images and traces of that body throughout its
history within the body of the work. Our perception of the work is changed
if we know the body is the artist's, and if we know the artist - perhaps
there are ways in which such work (perhaps like acting) can only be (in
Gertrude Stein's phrase, when asked for whom she was writing) for oneself
and strangers. But one can suggest something of the intent of the work,
its continuous paradoxes across the personal and the universal, the naked
and the nude, the specific and the mythical. In an early interview, Elaine
answered the question of why she used her own body by suggesting that
it was the only body about which she could be objective. Expanding in
conversation on that striking answer in the context of the new work -
I had suggested that the easiest reading of the use of one's own body
was that it suggested subjectivity, introspection - Elaine began to tease
out not just anecdotal material about the circumstances of creation, but
through and beyond such material the deeper ambitions of the work. As
with self-portraiture, the artist's own body is always there for the artist
to work from; but Elaine was also subjecting the body to a number of procedures
suggesting at best discomfort and at worst mental and physical torture
and constraint, and to have done this - however symbolically - through
a model would somehow have repeated the exploitation pictured. The pressures
represented by, performed through images have involved the personal -
as the explicit references to Plath's Bell Jar suggest - but the major
themes - particularly birth and death (the body as corpse, particularly
an ancient corpse) - involve personal experience as universal. And also
as political: the pressures of a childhood in Northern Ireland were palpable,
and without the work being 'about' Ireland, it came out of those pressures,
that body politic. Nor is the recent work 'about' the civil war in what
once was Yugoslavia, but it was provoked by it, and a horror held in common
with us all may have led to a particular engagement with that horror through
art because it was (so to speak) a fulfillment of a childhood fantasy/
prophecy/ fear of civil war. The reality to which it runs parallel, however,
was not internalised, and - I am moving here into interpretation and away
from an attempt to suggest intention - this also makes sense of a striking
new source of body imagery in the new prints and paintings (and an installation
which preceded them). There are many ways in which a flayed figure can
be seen as a logical culmination as well as a reversal of the layers of
materials and the bindings of earlier work; and the strange combination
of activity and exposed internal structure in these anatomical demonstrations
is equally a kind of mirror of our wonder at an earlier source, the miraculously
preserved corpses from the bogs. And yet these new 'objective' bodies
are also distant, as news footage is distant - and, equally, they are
(unlike the artist's own body) two-dimensional in advance of the print
in which they feature. They are also (again unlike the artist's own body)
male, and - despite their scientific purpose - they echo the heroic, active
nudity of history painting, violent as much as victims of violence. They
are ideal rather than universal; a particular kind of abstract beauty
has replaced a particular kind of identification; and a particular link
to language - particular poets, myths, riddles - has also, however temporarily,
departed from the work. The artist is no longer clearly both before and
within the image, looking on and out at herself. There is continuity,
but also change: the family has a new member. Pun intended.
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