Mapping the Self with artist Liz Rideal

What does it mean to be seen in a world obsessed by public image? Our persona is at once everything and nothing. SeeMe HearMe is series of events produced by Elmfield that seek to explore what it means to genuinely listen to oneself and to others around us. How does it feel to be truly witnessed by another? And how can more effective and sustainable ways of behaving be instigated as a result? Often we present a modified version of ourselves to the 'outside world', in order to make the perfect Instagram or FaceBook post. Reality TV feeds our need to create a flawless persona. But what does it feel like to drop this mask and reveal a more authentic self? 

Internationally renowned artist, author and Professor, Liz Rideal will take you through a 2-day journey of self-discovery. We will use a variety of drawing exercises for which no specific artistic techniques are required. We will explore ourselves from different perspectives, using simple materials such as paper, pencils and smart phone photography. This is not a workshop designed to improve artistic merit, rather a place where freedom of expression is invited, so that we can discover aspects of our selves that are perhaps dormant yet dominant. To nudge our perceptions and observe what these can reveal about the self.

Liz Rideal is an artist, author and Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Since 1985, Rideal has exhibited widely in both public and private art galleries across Europe and America, resulting in seven catalogue publications and twenty public commissions. Her artwork is held in Collections including Tate; Victoria & Albert Museum; British Museum; The National Portrait Gallery; The Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; The George Eastman Museum, Berkeley Art Museum & the Yale Centre for British Art, USA. 

Rideal received a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2016-17, a British Academy grant for work in India in 2011, and the Rome Wingate Scholarship at the British School at Rome, in 2008/9. Author ofMirror/Mirror: Self-portraits by Women Artists, National Portrait Gallery, London, and Watson-Guptill, NY, 2001; Insights: Self-portraits, NPG, London, 2005; andHow to Read Painting, Bloomsbury, London, and Rizzoli, NY, 2014 and 2015, translated into six languages with a print run in excess of 55,000. Rideal contributed an essay to The Erotic Cloth; Seduction and Fetiishism in Textiles, Bloomsbury Academic, wasco-author with Kathleen Soriano of Madam and Eve: women portraying women, Laurence King and wrote the introduction to Phaidon’s 500 Self-portraits, all in 2018. Rideal appeared in the Netflix series Raiders of the Lost Art(2016) and writes about painting for the ART/UK website.