Liz Piper - Artist and Reflexologist

Portrait and interview - 1994

Liz, born in November 1924, went to Foxhole School in Dartington at a time when there was considerable interaction between the School and the Hall.  Consequently, the children had the opportunity to study with working artists – Hein Heckroth, a designer for the Joos Ballet; Willi Soukop, a sculptor and Bernard Forrester, a potter.

Liz then went to London to study medicine, failing her MB in 1943.  For the rest of the war, she worked on a farm, returning to London in 1946 where she attended the LSE and Pitman’s College.

By chance, she met Bill Curry the Head Master of Dartington, and he asked her back to house-mother at Foxhole.  Two years later, she returned to London yet again.  By this time, there was a flourishing art and jazz scene in Soho, and Liz’s two brothers (never giving up their day jobs) were founder members of The Crane River Jazz Band which had a club in Great Newport Street.  It was here that she met her husband Denis Piper, then a student at Camberwell.  Denis became a graphic designer and Liz then spent many years “making coffee for ‘real’ artists!”

In 1956, Liz returned to Totnes with three school age sons and eventually started to work at Joy Nightingale’s pottery group, only to discover that she was only making pots in order to decorate them.  Liz learned reflexology with Detta Lange, and worked for some years at the Totnes Natural Health Centre.  One day, as she was attending to some feet, the client confessed that she was feeling guilty at having dropped out of a project on ‘repressed creativity’.  This phrase somehow ‘rang a bell’ and Liz contacted Mags Blackwell, the project organiser.  After purchasing a roll of wallpaper, two brushes and a quantity of poster paint, Liz started out as an artist.  After six months, the three participants showed their work at Dillington House in Somerset, and Mags made a teaching video called 'Gathering Strength', which documented their work and recorded the comments made by the artists as they gradually came to realise their potential.

Update: Liz has exhibited at the Dartington Print Workshop and has shown work at Coombe Farm, The White Hart Gallery in Long Melford, Suffolk, The White House Gallery in Plymouth and The Brewhouse in Taunton.  In June 1994, an exhibition of her work was held at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Sadly, Liz died in 2016.