Reading Rooms at Void Gallery

It will run alongside the exhibition by Kelly Richardson entitled ‘Haunted’.

Groups of young people from Customised Training and two over 50s groups will view the exhibition and also engage in a Reading Rooms session linked to the themes of the exhibition.

“Our Reading Rooms uses a reading aloud and shared reading setting to encourage participants to share personal experiences from their past sparking memories, stimulating new thoughts and provoking conversations related to the short story and poems being used by the facilitator who are all trained volunteers. The Reading Rooms project has been delivered out in schools, with young people, with older people, with those with dementia etc since 2013,” said Andrea Doran from the Verbal Arts Centre.

“This event marks the wonderful partnership between the Void Gallery and the Verbal Arts Centre in this unique venture. These sessions not only continues the invaluable work that VAC has conducted with the Reading Rooms but will also introduce groups of people to visual arts in a gallery setting; which is an arts experience they may not normally chose to engage with. Our work with Reading Rooms has shown outcomes beyond our expectations and it is wonderful to continue to help build on this engagement with them in a gallery setting. The stories read this week will all relate to science and space in conjunction with the Kelly Richardson exhibition”.

Kelly Richardson, a Canadian born artist, works with digital technologies to create hyper-real and highly charged landscapes. Her practice centres around video and photography which often employs a high standard of special effect, mixing real footage with digitally constructed elements. Her exhibition showcases three pieces; ‘Orion Tide’, ‘Exiles of the Shattered Star’ and ‘Mariner 9’.

This final piece is a giant panoramic vision of the planet Mars set 200 years in the future. Visitors can experience another world with strange lights and sounds. Created using NASA’s own data, Mariner 9 shows Mars and is set 200 years in the future.

The artist worked with imagery and technical data from NASA, combining it with Terragen, a complex scenery generation software used by the film and gaming industries, to create an uber-realistic red planet, minutely replicating its distinctive geology and weather patterns. For more information on the Reading Rooms project please contact the Verbal Arts Centre on 02871 266 946 and for information on Kelly Richardson contact Void Gallery on 02871 308 080.