Anne Lydiat is a British artist based on the southeast coast of England. Her background in BA Fine Art and MA Fine Art Sculpture allowed her creative freedom and then, as now, her artworks were concept driven, not aligned to any specific discipline. Lydiat’s undergraduate artworks were a celebration of her personal experience in visual form – a three-dimensional journey. Her postgraduate artworks similarly expressed a female centred approach to her practice albeit through a more formal exploration of traditional sculptural materials.

After graduating, Lydiat was appointed as the first woman Henry Moore Fellow (1985-87). Throughout the Fellowship she contextualised her artworks within a women’s tradition of making, exhibited in her Fellowship exhibition ‘Waiting for the Seventh Wave’ (1987), and in her exhibition ‘WITHOUT at the Beguinage of Sint Elisabeth, a liminal and silent (women only) space. The catalogue/ publication ‘WITHOUT’ was both subject and object within the space, a souvenir or memento mori. In both these exhibitions a radical absence was introduced by removing the middle of the objects, thus creating a loss. These abject centres produced a material residue, which was then reformed into a new object – literally ‘making something out of nothing’.  

One of the significant and recurring aspects of Lydiat’s work, whatever media she adopts, is a concern for language and the meanings associated with it. In her exhibition ‘Nomenclature’ (1995) the naming of things returns as a preoccupation represented by Latin names inscribed on plant labels. In ‘White Garden’ the sterile white ceiling roses were laid on the gallery floor with no need of identification since their endless repetition reproduces only sameness, not difference.

Absence, loss and nothingness were the context for the blank book ‘lost for words…’  (1999). Alongside the exhibition ‘Permission to Speak’ (2002), Freud Museum, a copy of ‘lost for words…’ was permanently placed in Sigmund Freud’s library. ‘…of the book’ - a topography of nothingness, was the list of libraries where ‘lost for words…’ had been secretly deposited. A text in relation to the site specificity of each intervention. Would a Chinese silence be different from a French silence?

In 2002 Lydiat moved onboard a converted trading vessel moored on the River Thames. This fluvial existence, constantly suspended in, and surrounded by, water became central to her art practice.  To capture this elemental state, Lydiat made a series of artworks entitled ‘In Her Element’ all inextricably linked to the vessel in a constantly changing relationship to duration, space and place, edge and boundary and the ebb and flow of the tides. 

Whilst afloat, Lydiat developed an interest in women’s maritime history challenging the perceptions of the ship as a space solely occupied by men. On discovering the pioneering voyages of the American Arctic explorer Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1892) Lydiat was awarded a Library Research Fellowship at the Louise A. Boyd Archive, USA. In 2018 Lydiat led an Arctic expedition to Louise Boyd Land, northeast Greenland, when she rephotographed locations that Boyd had photographed some eighty years earlier. In 2023/ 24 Lydiat exhibited both Boyd’s 1931 expedition photographs and her own photographs, film and catalogue from her 2018 expedition entitled ‘WAKE - An Expedition to Louise Boyd Land’. As an acknowledgement of the importance of her expeditions, in 2024 Lydiat was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). 

Recently Lydiat has been experimenting more freely and concentrating on the things that impact on her life, particularly around questions of sustainability and the environment.  For the exhibition ‘Of Mutability’ (2024) she selected some of the digital colour photographs of Arctic icebergs from her 2016 voyage to Greenland. The images were then converted to black and white and printed onto poster paper with low-grade inks, guaranteed to fade and disappear over time. Some of the prints were hung inside behind glass and bleached by the UV rays of the sun, others were hung outside and left to the elements for several weeks. Lydiat used these experimental photographic images as objects, and like the actual icebergs were subjected to the vagaries of our climate. In her latest artworks, ‘IMMUTABILITY’ (2025) the faded, deconstructed, images have been ‘freeze framed’ and printed with high quality inks and paper,  guaranteed to permanently suspend the moments of irreversible change…