Phew! the Brecon exhibition is up and running but it has been a roller-coaster of a week. It started with the airline loosing our luggage, followed by several hours late at night spent in Accident and Emergency because my husband's essential medication was in the suitcase. ( Yes , I know one should never put pills in a suitcase still we were only going from Edinburgh to Cardiff).
The gallery space in Brecon, part of their new library, turned out to be HUGE! two whole rooms. That was the good news. The bad news was a misunderstanding between the gallery and myself over what we could hang on the walls. Because all the work – 120 digital prints- were all mounted on fodex boards I expected to be able to put them straight on to the wall using either velcro or white tak. This was not permitted. Instead there was a rush to re-surface A1 boards from the last exhibition…just as well we had allowed a couple of days for all this.
Anyway, the exhibition opened on Friday morning with an introduction by Dr Carole Reeves Outreach Historian with The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London . She said this project is a "world first…because nobody has ever gathered together the collective memories of people who lived inside a TB sanatorium . certainly not children."
She added that it could not have been done without the internet where the computer literate children of the children who were in Craig-y-nos Castle have come forward with photographs and stories on email.
The Mayor of Brecon, Rosemary Evans, officially opened the exhibition.
