Alice Lenkiewicz
It’s difficult to separate Alice Lenkiewicz from the act of making. She has lived inside art for as long as she can remember, and My Life Through Art, Volume One unfolds as a continuous thread between lived experience and creative practice. Spanning 262 pages and illustrated with 240 black-and-white images, the book sits somewhere between memoir, archive, and reflection. It is informal, intimate, and at times wandering—qualities that give it its distinctive vitality.
Based in Liverpool, Lenkiewicz is both an artist and a writer, trained in English and Writing Studies, and this dual perspective shapes the book’s tone. She moves fluidly between visual thinking and lyrical prose, shifting from precise observation to near-dreamlike reflection. The result resists the conventions of both the art monograph and the autobiography, reading instead like a deeply textured visual diary.
The narrative traces her development from early influences to her first solo exhibition in 1988, set against a childhood immersed in art. Her father, the painter Robert Lenkiewicz, is an unavoidable presence, but never dominates the story. Alice writes about him with clarity and restraint, acknowledging his influence without mythologising it, and reflecting honestly on the challenge of forging an independent artistic voice in close proximity to a prolific figure.
Images punctuate the text throughout—sketches, paintings, photographs, many previously unseen—marking shifts in time and thought. They reveal a process-driven practice, full of experimentation and revision, where styles move between abstraction and narrative without settling into performance. What emerges is not a polished retrospective, but a record of searching.
At its core, the book refuses to separate life from work. Lenkiewicz writes about art as something akin to belief or attachment: sustaining, demanding, and inescapable. Her reflections are thoughtful but never didactic, marked by warmth, uncertainty, and a rare openness. Themes such as animal rights, nature, memory, and transformation recur not as topics, but as an ethical framework running through both image and text.
My Life Through Art is not definitive or closed. Some passages drift, some memories remain unresolved, but this openness feels intentional. It reads as a living document rather than a finished statement—suggesting that the story continues. Beneath its personal specificity lies a broader question shared by many artists: how to keep seeing the world afresh. Lenkiewicz, for now, clearly still does.
