It isn’t easy to separate Alice Lenkiewicz from the act of making — she’s been doing it all her life, and My Life Through Art, Volume One is a long, unbroken thread between the personal and the creative. At 262 pages and packed with 240 black-and-white images, the book is part memoir, part archive, part reflection on what it means to live inside art rather than make it. It’s messy, personal, and occasionally meandering — which is precisely what gives it life.
Lenkiewicz, a Liverpool-based artist and writer, carries the kind of dual sensibility that makes her story more layered than most: she’s both a visual maker and a writer with a background in English and Writing Studies. She thinks in images but writes in moods — one moment sharp and observational, the next almost dreamlike. The result isn’t a polished art monograph or a tidy autobiography, but something closer to a visual diary with depth.
The book traces her creative journey from early influences through to her first solo exhibition in 1988. Along the way, it unpacks a childhood steeped in art — her father, the painter Robert Lenkiewicz, looms large, though never oppressively. His presence is a ghostly undercurrent rather than a headline act. Alice’s reflections on him are affectionate but unsentimental. There’s no mythologising here, just an honest look at what it’s like to grow up in the orbit of a famously prolific artist while forging one’s own visual language.
The images — hundreds of them — act as punctuation marks, shifting the rhythm of the text. Some are early sketches, others are paintings or photographs, and many are previously unseen. They give the reader a tactile sense of time passing, of experiments tried and abandoned, of the incremental work behind every “finished” piece. Her style, even in reproduction, appears to shift between worlds: sometimes abstract and intuitive, and occasionally narrative and symbolic. You can see her exploring, not performing.
What makes the book worth reading isn’t just its insight into one artist’s evolution, but its refusal to separate life from work. Lenkiewicz writes about art the way one might write about love or faith — as a force that pulls you forward, complicates you, sometimes exhausts you, but never lets go. Her tone is reflective but unpretentious. She doesn’t lecture. She remembers. There’s warmth and hesitation in her voice, a kind of vulnerability you rarely find in artist memoirs that are too carefully edited or too self-conscious about legacy.
Her interests — animal rights, the natural world, memory, transformation — thread through both her writing and her imagery. These aren’t passing subjects; they form a moral framework that holds the work together.
My Life Through Art isn’t flawless — some sections drift, some memories feel half-lit — but that’s its charm. It is a work in progress, alive and breathing. You sense that Volume Two will follow, because the story isn’t done, and because artists like Lenkiewicz rarely stop to declare completion.
It’s a deeply personal account, but one that resonates more broadly. Behind every image and recollection lies the unspoken question that all artists face: how to see the world as if for the first time. Lenkiewicz, it seems, still does.