'Stunned, honoured and absolutely delighted': Anne Desmet elected Royal Academician

We are delighted to announce that Anne Desmet, Honorary Fellow of the School of Art, has been elected full Member of the Royal Academy of Arts. Anne has been a great friend to the School of Art: she has served as both undergraduate and postgraduate external examiner, twice exhibited in our galleries (1999 & 2009), offered tutorials and workshops for students as well as public talks, and in 2009 assisted in the assembling a major representative selection of her works for the School of Art Collection, for which significant grants were awarded by the ArtFund and the (then) MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund.

Anne is Editor of Printmaking Today, a quarterly journal of international graphic arts, and a visiting lecturer in wood engraving at the Royal Academy Schools and elsewhere. She was born in Liverpool in 1964, studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford University (BA & MA) and Central School of Art and Design, London (PGDip), then held a scholarship at the British School in Rome. Her wood engravings and other prints explore themes of architecture and metamorphosis. Following the year in Italy, many of her works were inspired by architecture and landscape, specifically the multi-layered nature of cities, where ancient ruins co-exist with twentieth-century apartments. Indicating both the passage of time and human intervention, she demonstrates how past and present influence one another, provoking reflection on the dangers of environmental vandalism. Using print, collage and drawing she layers and mutates architectural forms, exploring the nature of change, stasis and the revelatory qualities of excavation. Anne often uses a sequential format to imply time, change and chains of thought. Alternatively, she sometimes uses several blocks of varying shapes and sizes on which she engraves the components of an image that is reassembled, like a jigsaw, in the printing.

Her works are represented in major UK collections such as those of the Ashmolean Museum, British Museum, V&A, and Whitworth Gallery, Manchester.

Image (above right): Anne Desmet, Victoria Baths, Manchester, linocut, 2008, School of Art Collection