Canadian artist Kelly Richardson (*1972) belongs to a new generation of artists working with digital technologies to create hyperreal, symbolically highly charged landscapes. Her series of digitally-born works Pillars of Dawn imagines a desert landscape in which environmental conditions have crystallised the terrain. The series presents a scenario in which we might have to look beyond our current planet for refuge and survival, and they raise myriad questions about how we arrived as such a moment of environmental crisis. Kelly Richardson was born in Burlington, Ontario, Canada in 1972. From 2003-2017 she resided in north east England where she was a Lecturer in Fine Arts at Newcastle University. She currently lives and works as a visitor on the traditional territory of the WSANEC peoples of the Coast Salish Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. She is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria. Richardson's work has been acquired into significant museum collections across the UK, USA and Canada, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, SMoCA and Albright-Knox Art Gallery to the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Arts Council Collection (England) and the Towner. 30 colour images
