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.
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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.
Arthur Watson |