Paused

Peter Richards

The Golden Thread Gallery is pleased to present ‘ Paused ' by Peter Richards.

'Paused', an exhibition by artist, Peter Richards, curated by Megan Johnston initially for the Millennium Court Arts Centre.

This exhibition is about documenting or capturing people in a place for a moment in time - creating a shared space between the photographer and the subject, and the community participating in developing their own creativity through the experience. To do this Richards photographed social/civic groups and individuals within the Craigavon community using a pinhole camera, producing a series of ten large-scale, richly saturated, colour prints. Groups collaborating with Richards on the ‘Paused' series ranged from members of the Craigavon Borough Council, to the local circus school, to Lough Neagh fisherman. Richards is ultimately mapping moments in time, emphasised by the accompanying video documentation capturing the ‘Paused' individuals and groups in ‘real time' for the duration of the pinhole exposure.

In ‘Paused', Richards continues his discourse on representation in performance art, as seen in the previous work Performance Lucida, and he highlights the notion that even a simple photograph constitutes a performance, while posing the question as to whom is performing?: the photographer or those photographed, or both? Richards literally transforms the participants into performance artists.

Richards was born in Cardiff in 1970. He was educated at University of Wales, Cardiff before completing his M.Phil. studies ‘Representations of Representations' at the University of Ulster, Belfast in 1998. Solo exhibitions have included: Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; Cornerhouse, Manchester, Model Arts Centre; Sligo, Millennium Court Art Centre, Portadown, Belfast and Belfast Exposed. Group exhibitions have included: L'Art dans le Monde , Beaux arts, Paris; Through A Glass Darkly , Het Consortium, Amsterdam; NI gulp , Plug In – ICA Gallery, Winnipeg; Barber, Richards & Torrens , Galeria Dzialan, Warsaw; New Contemporaries 99, South London Gallery & Liverpool Biennial; Photo 98 , Hull Time Based Arts & Ferrens Gallery, Hull; 2e Recontre International d'art Performance , Quebec; The National Review of Live Art , The Arches, Glasgow and L'Evenement Oblique , Tangente, Montreal.

Schools, colleges and community group visits to the gallery are welcomed. Please contact Peter at the gallery to arrange group visits in advance or to find out more about the galleries associated activities.