Heritage Sketchbooks & Jenni Robinson Exhibition @ NDM

A new exhibition opens in North Down Museum’s Community Gallery on Tuesday 11th June.  Readers are invited to the opening event at 4pm.

A joint venture between local landscape artist Jenni Robinson, and members of the community who participated in Boom Studios’ Heritage Sketchbook Project last year, the gallery next to the museum cafe will be alive with vibrant contemporary paintings and drawings.

Led by Jenni, Boom Studios’ 2023 Heritage Sketchbook Project was awarded a Heritage Grant from Ards & North Down Borough Council, and brought together 10 people with a connection to Bangor to capture the seafront in its pre-redevelopment state.

Covering Pickie Park, Queens Parade and McKee Clock areas, the project brought the group together for outdoor sketching sessions and captured the everyday, warts-n-all landmarks, dereliction and layers of exposed history. They are also poignant story-telling devices, as the artists impart their own memories, experiences and hopes of their lives and times in Bangor.

The sketchbooks will be under cases, with a digital representation playing on screen for you to enjoy.  The walls will be adorned with Jenni Robinson’s original landscape paintings and drawings.

Following her 2022/23 Fieldwork project, Jenni made a switch to working almost exclusively from sketchbook material, instead of photographs.

The reduced information contained in a sketch leaves room for intuition, memory and a narrative of thoughts in the studio painting process.  The resulting artworks are often more abstract, focusing not only on wide views but zoomed renderings of the landscape’s features, incorporating layered drawing as a nod to their sketchbook roots and inviting the viewer to consider their place in the space.