Staff

Elaine Shemilt
BA, MA, RCA, FRSA, FRGS

Professor

Tel: 01382 385145
Email: e.shemilt@dundee.ac.uk
DJCAD Visual Research Centre
Dundee Contemporary Arts
152 Nethergate, Dundee DD1 4DY

Biography

Elaine Shemilt is an academic, researcher and artist. Senior Lecturer at DJCAD since 1989, she received a personal chair in Fine Art Printmaking in 2005.

Shemilt is Artistic Director of the Centre for Remote Environments a research and consultancy unit within DJCAD. Artistic practice involves sculpture, installation, printmaking and digital media. She has always experimented with a combination of materials and media and has an international reputation for innovation in the use of printmaking across art forms. In her early career her work was exhibited at The Hayward Annual, The Bradford International Print Biennale and the Video Show in the Serpentine Gallery, London. More recently her work has been shown at the Imperial War Museum, London and in Warsaw, Berlin, Singapore, Campobasso, Italy.

For her work with environmental protection and South Georgia Shemilt was made a Shackleton Scholar in 2001.

Member of the Board of Advisors for the Mills Observatory in Dundee and President of the Society of Scottish Artists.

PhD Supervision

Offers supervision in Fine art, printmaking, art/science.

2004-2009 Ruth Pelzer- “The poetics of Repetition”

Research Projects

The Demarco Archives: Accessing a 40-Year Dialogue between Richard Demarco and the European Avant-Garde. AHRC Resource Enhancement Award, 2005, £312,000. (P.I. Dr Macarthur, C.I. Watson, C.I. Prof Shemilt).
Shemilt was C.I. on this project from 2005-2008. For the past four decades Demarco has contributed to Scotland’s cultural life. His 250,000 photographs plus books, documents and original artworks and unique material of international range and significance, relevant to contemporary visual art, theatre, literature, cultural studies, history and politics. www.demarco-archive.ac.uk

Sci-ART Blueprint for Bacterial Life - a research project with Scientists from SCRI (The Scottish Crop Research Institute). The full genome sequence of the bacterial potato plant pathogen (Erwinia) carotovora subsp. atroseptica (Eca) been fully sequenced in a project led by the SCRI in collaboration with the Sanger Institute. As well as developing translational and interpretation prints Shemilt is working with colleagues on a translation of the sequence into music and into a multi media art form with hi definition animations. The research is currently featured in a book AHRC ICT Methods Network, Volume ‘Art Practice in a Digital Culture,’ published by Ashgate in 2010. ISSN 1743-3959 ISBN 978 -1 84150-248-9.

Centre for Remote Environments. Originally known as project Atlantis the work started in 2002 with a web-based research contract dealing with the environmental sustainability of the island of South Georgia for the Government of South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. The work involved the representation of complex data for wide audiences, from children to scholars. The research now extends into Habitat Restoration on the Island, as well as a study of the ‘Discovery Science’ of the early 20th Century. Dissemination of the environmental issues occurs through the website www.sgisland.org and the Discovery House Visitors Centre on South Georgia, which is the recently refurbished shell of the historic scientific research station. Stakeholders include British Antarctic Survey, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Scott Polar Institute, National Oceanographic Society.

The Dry Valleys
Maps are both texts and images. They also have an intimate relation with reality, as we use them to get around: we generally read them in direct relation to our surroundings.” (Alan Woods)

“ I have always been fascinated by the particular excitements aroused by a sense of place, the distinction of a particular genius loci. This is true if the place, space or location is indeed a real one but is certainly also true in the location has been invented in words, in a painting or in the cinema.” (Peter Greenaway)

I have recreated the locations in geographical exactness in response to what I was given or could gather about the Dry Valleys of the Antarctic.

The rest is invented.