Roe Valley Arts & Cultural Centre is inviting the public to join artists Gail Mahon and Mhairi Sutherland for the launch of Echoes, a new two-person exhibition exploring one of the north coast’s most unusual and intriguing heritage sites — the former military Trainer Dome at Artikelly, Limavady.
The exhibition opens on Thursday 8 October at 7pm, with everyone welcome to attend.
The Echoes two-person exhibition by artists Gail Mahon and Mhairi Sutherland is a dynamic, artistic exploration of the former Trainer Dome in Artikelly, Limavady. Each artist has, respectively, been researching this unique site within the north coast landscape for almost a decade.
Artworks include photography, video, drawing, geological clays and collaboration with a photographer, movement specialist and a musician. A Scheduled Monument, the Dome is an impressive 40-foot-high, bitumen black, high-domed structure, originally one of forty military ‘classrooms’ designed to train AA gunners during WW2. This is the only remaining Dome in Northern Ireland.
Unique both architecturally and in the history of photography as the original immersive lens-based experience, connected to the geology and Binevenagh landscape, the Dome is now future-facing, bringing its collective histories into transformation as a reimagined cultural and community resource.
Quote by Dr Bryonie Reid, author of the ‘becoming’ essay in the Echoes publication;
“They (the artists) interpret but refuse to pin it down. In their visions, it remains neither one thing nor another. It remains both ephemeral and solid, dark and light, present and absent. Its curves mark image after image in this exhibition, performing a perpetual cycle of movement around a fixed point, leaving and returning, endlessly becoming.”
Echoes is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Causeway Coast & Glens Heritage Trust, Binevenagh & Coastal Lowlands Landscape Partnership Scheme, Causeway Coast & Glens Borough Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Alongside the exhibition, Gail and Mhairi will also deliver curriculum-linked creative learning sessions for secondary schools and colleges, exploring ways of using the site and its history as a starting point for creative research.
For further information about the exhibition and accompanying workshops, visit roevalleyarts.com