Elaine Shemilt

Who is Elaine Shemilt?

Elaine Shemilt is an artist and researcher, especially known as a fine art printmaker. Her work ranges across a wide variety of media. However hers is not a conventional approach to the medium. According to the art historian and theorist Alan Woods: "Her work ranges across a wide variety of media. Initially it 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."

She is a graduate of Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art and has exhibited internationally including Switzerland, Denmark, Holland, Canada, USA, Australia, Italy and Germany including the Hayward and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and 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 one has survived: "Doppelgänger", which was recovered and remastered by the REWIND video art project in 2011.