The exhibition of paintings by Vivien Blackett runs from 21 May to 31 July and is open to the public 2pm - 7pm Monday to Friday.

The works are on show in the bar area in the basement of the Keppel Street building.

An essay by Sotiris Kyriacou accompanies the exhibition.

About the artist

Vivien Blackett studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College. She was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in 1986/7 and at Camden Arts Centre in 1992. She has work in a number of public collections, including the British Council and lives and works in London.

"My work is concerned with generating new meaning through the juxtaposition of different images, both borrowed and invented. I am interested in our quest for knowledge of the world we inhabit and take imagery from a variety of sources including history, botany and medicine arid refer to paintings and prints from the Early Renaissance in addition to more contemporary images, e.g. microscopic photographs.

I use the formal structure, discrepancies of scale and context and harmony or discord between the panels, to suggest potential meaning.

The Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine has become one of my most valuable sources because it is a library I can browse through and I often don’t know what I am looking for until I see it! I borrow images from books on subjects as diverse as chemistry, cooking and witchcraft, which I adapt as I work, often combining them with images of my own invention.

My interest in illusion and in the difference between the surface appearance of things, what does or might lie beneath; things we cannot see without instruments or indeed can only imagine, has been developing in the group of work I have been making since 1997, when I made a series of multiple panel paintings for the Adam Gallery called Above, below, within. It is a selection of these works that I am showing at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine."

Vivien Blackett

Coordinator of contemporary arts programme at LSHTM: Tony Fletcher