Elaine Shemilt
Directing
Biography
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."
Known For
Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.
Kill Your TV: Jim Moir’s Weird World of Video Art
Doppelgänger is a video performance in which Shemilt manipulates her body and her image into creating a phantasmal double of herself.
Doppelgänger
"This film was made in an effort to illustrate briefly the parody of life as a series of conflicts. For example the initial conflict between innocence and social convention, as seen in the confusion of a child. I have tried to project the subconscious conflict-contradiction-of life and inevitable death. Thus the film is in two movements as it were. In the first, a figure dressed in white to symbolise life, moves through and explores a series of structures and objects. In the second movement the figure is replaced by a figure in black, who wanders back through the wreckage of the structures. As death, she controls life until they write into nothingness." - Elaine Shemilt
Conflict
A 16 mm film shot in three sequences. First exhibited at Winchester School of Art in 1976, then at the New Contemporaries– Live Show, Acme Gallery in London (1976). The film was sent to the International Festival of Women Artists, Film Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1980. It languished in the archives in Denmark until its re-discovery by the KØN – Gender Museum Denmark in 2021. A new 4k digital scan was made by the DJCAD Media Preservation Lab at the University of Dundee in October 2021.