Elaine Kowalsky was born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1948. Trained at the University of Manitoba School of Art (BFA Hons, 1971), she moved to Britain in 1973 to pursue postgraduate study in printmaking. Her practice embraced large-scale, vividly coloured woodcuts and experimental book-works developed as ‘parallel narratives’, overlaying contemporary female perspectives on historical texts. She also co-founded the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), where she championed artists’ rights for two decades.
Artist and activist, Elaine Kowalsky was born on 24 September 1948 in Winnipeg, Canada. Trained at the University of Manitoba School of Art (BFA Hons, 1971), she moved to Britain in 1973 to pursue postgraduate study in printmaking at St Martin’s School of Art (1973–74) and Brighton Polytechnic (1974–75).
Sustaining a dual practice as an internationally exhibiting printmaker and as an advocate for artists’ rights, Kowalsky’s work is most closely associated with print, in particular the audacious scale and energy of her woodcuts—often as large as 6 x 4 feet—with their vivid colour, dynamic mark-making and powerful imagery. Alongside relief printing she developed an expansive practice that encompassed lithography, monoprinting, painting and drawing, as well as artists’ books, ceramics, rugs and screens; she even produced a tongue-in-cheek pop-up, The Dog Detective of Barking (1994). Central to her work was what she described as ‘parallel narratives’—a method of setting visual storytelling against found texts, often by drawing and collaging directly onto their pages. In projects such as Marian & Dorothy and Down North on the Labrador, she overlaid contemporary, often distinctly female voices, onto historical or masculine narratives. Selected pages were then scanned and further worked for printing on handmade paper, and the imagery generated new bodies of monoprints and small sculptural objects. Her exhibition Marian & Dorothy at the Freud Museum, London (2000), underscored her interest in psychoanalytic frameworks and in the ‘placing’ of people at the margins of society; the show included a sequence of large monoprints derived from the book project and related objects. Kowalsky’s work was characterised by ‘a deceptively simple range of motifs—the silhouette of a woman’s figure, a house, and the internal organs of heart and womb’, employed to explore memory, myth, and the complexities of women’s psychic life without resorting to stereotype (Deepwell 1995).
A sequence of significant solo and touring exhibitions consolidated her reputation: Larger Than Life at Canada House, London, and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (both 1986); Hearts & Vessels at Leeds City Art Gallery and across the UK (1988–89, with catalogue essays by Tessa Sidey and others); and shows at Leeds (Printmaker of the Month, 2000), Oxford, Barnsley, Plymouth, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Portland and Toronto. In 1987 she was the inaugural recipient of the Henry Moore Fellowship in Printmaking at Leeds Polytechnic, marking a particularly fertile period. Returning to Canada for successive summers late in life, she embarked on oil sketches and drawings that captured the vast horizons and expansive skies of her homeland, presented as un-stretched, annotation-studded studies that retained the immediacy of a notebook page. Her final London solo, North (Platform, Spitalfields, 2004), extended this exploration of identity, voice and landscape through the lens of colonial narratives. From the late 1970s she held numerous visiting posts across British art schools—among them the Slade, Camberwell, Leicester, Manchester, Falmouth and the University of East London—alongside education work with museums and community programmes. Kowalsky also wrote, contributing anonymously to n.paradoxa between 1997 and 2004 with her witty column, Diary of an Ageing Art Slut, which satirised the ageism and sexism of the London art world; an excerpt was later broadcast on Canadian radio. Meanwhile, she continued to exhibit in women-centred shows in Southampton, Leeds and Johannesburg, in international print surveys, and in drawing projects such as SKETCH 2005, where her Spitalfields sketchbook North was selected.
Kowalsky was represented by the prestigious Redfern Gallery from the mid-1980s to early 1990s. Her studio was on Robinson Road in London's East End and her practice was inseparable from a remarkable record of service to fellow artists. In Brighton she helped to establish the North Star Studios printmakers’ co-operative (1977). In 1984 she was among the small group—alongside notable figures including Eduardo Paolozzi, Susan Hiller and David Shepherd—that founded DACS (Design & Artists Copyright Society), at a moment when visual artists in Britain lacked a dedicated rights organisation. She served as Chair of the Board from 1984 to 2000 and later as Honorary President, shaping an ethos of open membership and championing fair pay and robust copyright management. For over a decade she campaigned for the Artist’s Resale Right; her efforts were vindicated when the right was enacted in UK law from 1 January 2006, shortly after her death, and later embedded in DACS’s ongoing work.
Elaine Kowalsky died in London, England on 17 September 2005 in a car accident. Her legacy within DACS was recognised in 2006 when the society opened the Kowalsky Gallery at its Clerkenwell headquarters with an exhibition celebrating her life and work. In the UK public domain, her work is represented in the Government Art Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, Manchester City Art Gallery, Whitworth Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, and Birmingham City Art Gallery, among others.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Elaine Kowalsky]
Publications related to [Elaine Kowalsky] in the Ben Uri Library