A year in a Scottish hospital
It was the early 1950s, and Richardson was aged four. Her family lived in Libya, where her father, an army doctor, ran a British military hospital. The family was separated for the year. Richardson’s experience is commemorated in ‘Eat Your Porridge’, her new, solo exhibition at the Sarah Walker Gallery, in Castletownbere, Co Cork.
“I made the work about four years ago,” says Richardson. “There was nothing much happening out in the art world and I watched a television programme about young artists, who were all making work about their childhood. I just thought, ‘I might do a painting of my memories of when I was in hospital,’ which is the most traumatic thing that had happened in my childhood. It was very etched in memories. One painting turned into another and another, until there were ten.”
