Artist and writer on art who attended the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1981, in 1985 gaining a first-class honours degree and participating in the graduation show at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle. During her time at Newcastle Siderfin participated in A Time Sculpture performance by Andrew O’Hanlon, at Gulbenkian Studio Theatre, 1981; won a John Christie Scholarship, 1982; and in 1983 designed and built sets at that theatre for a production of Bertold Brecht’s Man is Man. In 1986, Siderfin was included in a three-artist show at Linton Court Gallery, Settle, writing that her aims then were “to amplify aspects of sensual perception and experience by isolating fragments of the organic or manufactured world which present compelling shapes and colours and using them to create visual entities which have ‘reality’ as their inspiration and paint as their matter – traditional painter’s aims.