Birgit Skiöld

Early life and studies Skiöld was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1923. She studied furniture design at Stockholm Tekniska Skolan (now Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design), and moved to London in 1948.

Artists sought out the Print Workshop to use the facilities, share knowledge and learn from Skiöld. These included Michael Ayrton, Fionnuala Boyd, Kathan Brown, Jim Dine, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Eduardo Paolozzi, Tom Phillips, Dieter Roth, Michael Rothenstein, William Tillyer, Joe Tilson and William G. Tucker.

It was unusual for a woman to be running such a prominent establishment at this time, but Skiöld's personality and connections led to a space she described as: “Not a business, not a college, not a gallery, simply an idea which has worked.” Her husband Peter Bird, director of Bradford City Art Galleries and Museums, described it as having "a lively and industrious atmosphere, when it was at its best, and a little chaotic on a bad day."

Students at the Royal College of Art, Central School of Art and Chelsea School of Art, among others, benefitted from her printmaking lectures, and she taught workshops in universities in the United States, Sweden and Japan.

Robert Erskine, who ran the St George's Gallery at 7 Cork Street, and who was to be influential in encouraging Stanley Jones to set up the Curwen Press, another operation with Fitzrovia connections through the Curwen Gallery in Windmill Street, was a generous supporter of Skiöld's vision. They were to organise several exhibitions of Print Workshop artists together over the coming years.

Work Skiöld was a pioneer in championing the status of printmaking as art, and experimenting with techniques including embossing, mixed media, Xerox printing and collage. She was also an early exponent of the artist's book (livre d’artiste), working on occasion with texts by other famous Fitzrovia residents, past and present.

Her first artist's book incorporated texts by the pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was born at No.38 Charlotte Street and later lived at No.50, and at 37 Fitzroy Square.

A shared love of Japan led her to produce three bookworks with poet and travel writer James Kirkup. The first, Scenes from Sesshu was published in 1977, the same year that the charge of blasphemous libel was resurrected and used for the first time in 50 years to prosecute Gay News for publishing Kirkup's poem The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name. Kirkup was a well known fixture in the pubs and clubs of Fitzrovia, and was renting a room above a shoe shop at 77A Tottenham Court Road from 1948.

Her archived papers are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.