Anne Lydiat studied BA Fine Art Sculpture, (1978/81) at Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) during a period of major upheaval in art school education. It was a great time to be a student with sit ins, a full grant, free materials and creative freedom!! Then, as now, her work was concept driven choosing the medium most suited to realising her ideas not aligned to any specific discipline. During this exciting time of change. Lydiat’s art works explored emerging discourses around autobiography, the personal as political, supported by an upsurge in feminist writings dealing with the emotional, psychological and intuitive centred practices. Lydiat’s undergraduate artworks were a celebration of her personal experience in visual form – a three dimensional journey. Lydiat studied MA Fine Art Sculpture (1981/82) at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University). Her postgraduate artworks similarly expressed a female centred approach to her practice albeit through a more formal exploration of traditional sculptural materials.

In 1985 Lydiat was appointed as the first female Henry Moore Fellow (1985-87). Throughout the fellowship she contextualised her artworks more specifically within a women’s tradition of making exhibited in ‘Waiting for the Seventh Wave’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham(1987). Due to the success of the fellowship, and partly due to the fact that there were few tenured women academics and virtually no mention of women artists until the early 80’s, Lydiat was invited to teach at various art institutions both nationally and internationally. Her commitment to teaching was paramount and her philosophy was that all art academics should be a practising artists. This commitment was highlighted in the artworks shown in her exhibition ‘Beyond the Shadow’ (1994).

In 1999 Lydiat took a sabbatical from her teaching and travelled alone to explore the Beguinages of Belgium - women only silent spaces. This was a critical period in Lydiat’s artistic development, absence and presence, silence and loss were to become central themes in her work. She was invited to exhibit her exhibition ‘WITHOUT’ in the St Annazal gallery, Béguinage of Sint Elisabeth, Kortrijk. Later that year she published her blank book lost for words… (1999), subsequently placed in the Sigmund Freud’s library, in the Freud Museum London as part of her exhibition ‘Permission to Speak’ (2002).

Also in 2002 Lydiat moved onto a barge, MB Rock, on the River Thames.  This fluvial domestic and creative existence, constantly suspended and surrounded by water, became central to both her art and sense of being. To capture the elemental state, Lydiat made a series of artworks entitled ‘In Her Element’ including drawings, video, photographs and writings, all inextricably linked to the vessel in a constantly changing relationship to duration, (the river as time passing), space and place, edge and boundary, and the ebb and flow of the tides.

Lydiat developed an interest in women’s maritime history, exploring the ship as a gendered space. She researched the cultural and historical narratives of women who sailed ‘Herstories’ and used the ship’s ‘wake’ as a metaphor to describe the transience of their presence. She created a series of artist books from her extensive library about, and by, women. ‘WAKE’ (2016) is a visual bibliography that challenged perceptions of the ship as a space occupied solely by men and ‘WITHDRAWN’ (2018), a book of books by women that have been discarded or withdrawn from libraries.

Central to Lydiat’s interest in women who sailed, was the discovery of the pioneering voyages of the American explorer Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1992), who led several expeditions into Artic regions between1924 and 1935. Lydiat’s first voyage ‘In the Wake of Louise Arner Boyd’ was an 11 day round trip on a Hurtigruten (Norwegian Postal Ships) sailing from Bergen-Kirkenes-Bergen calling at ports that she knew that Boyd had sailed from, making photographs, videos, ship drawings of the movement of the ship and a ship’s b(log).

In August/September 2016 she sailed around Scoresby Sund on the electric Icelandic sailing ship, SS OPAL (North Sailing), and in 2018 she led an expedition entitled Expedition to Louise Boyd Land, again sailing onboard the OPAL, into the fiords of East Greenland, in order to achieve her long-standing quest to reach Louise Boyd Land, located in the uninhabited and relatively unexplored east Greenland National Park. Again she made photographs, videos, ship drawings of the movement of the ship and a ship’s b(log) to record the voyage. On 1 September, 2018 Lydiat stepped onto the inhospitable terrain of Louise Boyd Land, probably the first woman since Boyd, and possibly the first person ever to do so.

In 2019 Lydiat was awarded a Library Research Fellowship at the Louise A. Boyd Archive, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA. As an acknowledgement of the importance of Lydiat’s expeditions into Arctic waters, realised in her exhibition, film and publication all entitled WAKE (2023/24) at The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), she was made a Fellow.

Lydiat’s final voyage was to Antarctica (2019,) again sailing on a Hurtigruten ship, a choice to travel as sustainably as possible onboard a large cruise ship. On this voyage Lydiat was afloat on International Women’s Day and contributed to a talk given on board about wives of great explorers.(see Herstories). No one had heard of the expeditions of Louise Arner Boyd as she was nobody’s wife.

Since returning once more to dry land in 2021, Lydiat has been making artworks in whatever medium seems most appropriate to her ideas, like the wind drawings, and shadow paintings made in her garden when the sun shines. She is now experimenting more freely and concentrating on the things that impact on her life on a daily basis, particularly around questions of sustainability and the environment. In her latest works entitled ‘Of Mutability’, Lydiat has taken some of the digital colour photographs of icebergs she made on her 2016 voyage around Scoresby Sund, converted them to black and white and then printed onto poster paper with low-grade inks. The images were then exposed to the sun’s UV rays, both inside and outside, over differing periods of time. These unique faded, dematerialised photographic images are intended to act as a metaphor for the effects that climate change is having on the Arctic seascape and ultimately our rising sea levels. They represent a tipping point, a moment of significant and irreversible change.