Elaine Shemilt

Elaine Shemilt (born 7 May 1954) 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."

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 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 (1979), and Women Soldiers (1984), which were recovered and remastered by the REWIND video art project in 2011.

From 1980–1982 she was one of the first Artists in Residence at the South Hill Park Arts Centre.

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.

Shemilt established the printmaking department of the School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (University of Dundee) in 1988 and was course director of printmaking from 1988–2001 and Chair of Printmaking from 2001–2021.

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.

Shemilt was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2000 and of the Royal Geographical Society in 2009.

In 2002 she was made a Shackleton Scholar and was awarded a Carnegie Scholarship.

She is a trustee and vice chair (2002–2020) 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.

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."

She is retired from academia but remains Professor Emerita of fine art printmaking and a professional member and former President of the Society of Scottish Artists and was its president from March 2007 until 2010.

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.

In 2011 she produced a series of Screenprints and laser cut embossed prints and a suite of these were acquired by the National Museum of Northern Ireland for their permanent collection in 2020.

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.

These were featured in a BBC4 programme Inside Museums, (episode 3) on the Ulster Museum in Belfast, broadcast on the 13th Oct 2020 at 7pm.

The programme was presented and written by Emma Dabiri, who wrote:

''“The final work I want to show you is also by a woman – though this one, interestingly, does the reverse, imploring us NOT to travel.

Elaine Shemilt is a contemporary artist, whose practice in recent years has turned more and more to environment activism.

This print is an outline of the Island of South Georgia.

Situated on the edge of the Antarctic South Georgia is a place loaded with significance.

It was once a base for seven whaling stations, home to a grisly orgy of blood and blubber, synonymous with the destruction of the natural world.

But in recent years the island has become a bellwether for environmentalists.

A barometer for the effects of climate change.

Shemilt invites us to look at this simple beautiful object – an embossed line on card and engage with a terrifying idea… that unless things change, unless we change, there will be fewer places for us to travel to at all.

It demonstrates one of the most profound ways in which our world has changed.

All that exploration, and the exploitation of the world’s resources, has created a world in which we need to travel less.

Even after a lockdown, where the skies were empty of planes for weeks, we cannot afford to become complacent."''

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.