Liz Atkin is an artist and educator. She reimagines her Compulsive Skin Picking and anxiety into drawings, photographs and performances. Liz is a mental health advocate and raises awareness for the disorder around the world. She has exhibited and taught in the UK, Europe, Australia, USA, Singapore and Japan. Her artwork and an archive of her advocacy for skin picking is held by the Wellcome Collection.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, she gave away more than 18,000 free #CompulsiveCharcoal newspaper drawings to commuters on public transport in London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Cologne and more.
Liz teaches art in schools, hospitals, hospices, prisons, arts venues and universities. She is an ambassador for The Big Draw, the world’s largest drawing festival, focusing on the role of creativity for health and wellbeing.
Liz received the Unstoppable Spirit Award for Outspoken Advocacy at the TLC Global Conference for Skin Picking and Hair Pulling Disorders in San Francisco in 2018, and was a finalist in the Janey Antoniou Award with Rethink Mental Illness in 2018. Her work has featured on TEDx, BBC News, Woman’s Hour, Vice, Women’s Health USA, Huffington Post, Channel News Asia, Metro, AlJazeera and more.
Workshop:
This art workshop will explore slow looking and flow, with drawing as a creative practice for mental health and wellbeing.
Liz’s art practice reimagines her lived experience of skin picking, a body-focused repetitive behaviour and she creatively explores the repetitive, tactile and sensory challenges of the disorder through drawing as a mindful refocus for anxiety and dysregulation in the body.
The session will explore seeing and being in the present moment, visual and tactile responses to texture, with process-led mindful approaches to mark making with charcoal. Drawing as a responsive, meditative, accumulative and shared process. Participants will work from small to large scale, the session will culminate in large collaborative drawings.