Architecture and archeology are very different disciplines – one involving building up, the other digging down – but they share roots in the same ancient Greek word ‘arche’, meaning ‘beginning’. An architect is the originator of a building; an archeologist delves into the origins of civilisations. There is a bit of both in Anne Desmet, an artist famous for her architectural imagery who is forever digging beneath the surfaces of things to explore the layers of history beneath.

True to its title, this show includes several ‘time sequences’ of works, some tracking changes in light or weather over the course of hours, others playing skipping stones across the centuries.

Anne Desmet was born in Liverpool, UK, in 1964. She gained a BA & MA at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Printmaking at Central School of Art and Design, London, UK. She has taught wood engraving widely, inc. at the RA Schools, British Museum and Middlesex University. An Honorary Fellow and former External Examiner (BA & MA Fine Art) Aberystwyth University, she is now External Examiner at Kingston College of Art. In 2011, Desmet was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and is only the third wood engraver ever elected to the RA in its entire history. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE), the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) and the Society of Wood Engravers (SWE).

In 1998 her retrospective exhibition,Anne Desmet: Towers and Transformations, opened at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, before touring the UK. In 2008, Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallerylaunched a new retrospective: Anne Desmet – Urban Evolution, which toured until 2010. Her exhibition: Anne Desmet – Olympic Metamorphoses toured the UK from 2010-12. Desmet’s prints feature in selected solo and group shows worldwide. Since 1987 she has received over 30 national and international awards including (1989-90) a British School at Rome Scholarship in Printmaking. She has had 16 solo shows in London since 1990, including 6 with Hart Gallery, which represented her from 2003-2012.