Liz Atkin

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 work is permanently held in the Wellcome Collection, South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, Derby Museum, and Bethlem Gallery Collection supported by the Peter Sowerby Foundation and National Lottery Heritage Fund. 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 People’s Choice Award and the Judge’s Favourite Award with the Contemporary Art Academy Award at the inaugural exhibition of Contemporary Kent Artists. She was awarded the Unstoppable Spirit Award for Outspoken Advocacy at the TLC Global Conference for Skin Picking and Hair Pulling Disorders in San Francisco, and was a finalist in the Janey Antoniou Award with Rethink Mental Illness. 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. 

‘There is an instinctive pull towards texture in my work, informed by my lifelong experience of compulsive skin picking. Charcoal possesses a texturally therapeutic quality, a soothing antidote to skin picking’s deeply tactile character. My drawings channel the restless energy into gesture, into mark, and abrasion on paper.

Grief Drawing no.11 is from series of works on love, loss and memory. I have always found comfort and surrender with the sea, it dissolves and holds me when things feel too much. Each drawing in this series captures a moment that passed too fast, evoking a wish for time to slow down. Raw heavy grief is refocused through charcoal, which softens and blurs the edges. The scale is deliberately immersive. My hands trace and retrace the shifting patterns of waves as tide and shadow and the flicker of light in the dust on the paper, shaped by what I remember and what slips away.’

We are delighted to have Liz as part of our Contemporary Kent Artists exhibition at The Horsebridge Arts Gallery the 7th - 19th of October 2026.

You can find out more about Liz and her work on her website and social media.