Elizabeth Akehurst graduated with a first class degree in mathematics from the University of Kent and continued postgraduate studies at Cambridge and Newcastle. However, a strong interest in painting always formed an integral part of Elizabeth's life. After a short career in full-time teaching, she began exploring painting, eventually dedicating her life to art. Her art always draws on particular experiences - meals with friends, builders at work, concerts. Landscapes are inspired by the Medway area which combines mudflats, reed-beds and industry. Elizabeth also paints the Shropshire and Norfolk countryside or from sitting in the gardens of friends.

The paintings arise slowly out of a long period of work. Initially rapid, preliminary studies are made in pen, ink or watercolour. The sketches, which are sometimes supplemented by photographs, are used to produce a large number of small pieces exploring compositional forms, colour and tone. Some of these may develop into larger watercolour, gouache or collage works. The subject begins to become “known” and work is begun on a series of oil paintings, maybe five or more at a time.

Sometimes the subject is considered from a viewpoint first taken within the very subject itself, then drawn up from a birds-eye view perspective. Paint is applied using a range of brushes, rollers or even a palette knife. Additional line is added, a vital compositional element in the work, with charcoal, oil pastel or the end of the brush. Texture and depth is created in planes; drawing the paint forwards or backwards animates the surface. The paintings are worked over many times as the artist moves from one piece to another,  experimenting with different forms until some element of that original event has been captured. By this time, the subject has acquired a life of its own.

For the title of the exhibition, 'More than Memory', Elizabeth Akehurst drew inspiration from D.H Lawrence's view of painting as an are of delicate awareness of the surrounding world. It is a way of seeing she has always incorporated into her own work.

‘The picture must all come out of the artist’s inside, awareness of forms and figures. We can call it memory, but it is more than memory. It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown’

- D.H. Lawrence