Liz Atkin is a visual artist based in London. With a background in theatre and dance, physicality underpins her creative practice. Skin is her primary source for corporeal art. She explores texture and transformation through body focussed repetitive behaviour, involving a sometimes violent rendering of the body in order to condense it to matter for resculpting.

Liz is interested in skin as a constantly transforming surface, ripe with memory, a flesh canvas. Her work is visceral and evocative, situated in the tradition of Live Art performance and abstract expressionism.

'I am interested in the availability of the skin to bear inscriptions. Whether it is mortified or glorified, marked or scarred, I employ my skin as both a boundary and point of correlation. My skin is unavoidably personal. It carries permanent marks of what my body has experienced, marks accidentally or consciously made its surface. Skin is a work in progress, it functions as a communicator for past, present and future, time unfolds through the flesh of the body and its appearance is constantly shifting.'

Liz completed a Masters with Distinction from Laban in 2007. She won The London Paper self-portrait award with the London Affordable Art Fair in February 2008. She has exhibited her work solo and group exhibitions in London at The Albany Theatre, The Gallery in Stoke Newington, APT Gallery in Deptford and at Camden People's Theatre for the month of October 2008. Liz recently participated in The Genesis Project, a month long artist residency working with and through the body in Los Angeles, California. She has recently collaborated with the Dance Artist in Residence at the Science Museum, Athina Valha, on a specially commissioned large scale performance.

The images here are from 'Interface,' an ongoing portraiture series working with flatbed scanners. Liz uses her face to explore and bridge the contention between that of the portrait and the anti-portrait. This work explores the distortion and disruption of representation. The images raise the threat of abjection, hints of violence in the self-destruction and transformation of facial identity confront the viewer. The images are at once beautiful and ugly, other worldly and bizarre, the face is captured in movement and stillness, textured and mutated. The skin erupts and transforms. One wonders if they are produced through painful or intrusive means. With this series, the facial fragments depict the process of dramatic change. The practice also exploits and experiments with light. It is a deliberately repetitive and compulsive process, with more than 1000 images now in the series.The commodification of the face raises questions of the relationship to the idea of 'self’.