Kelly Richardson is a Canadian artistwho creates immersive video and CGI landscape installations set in desolate, often extraterrestrial or post-human futures.,Her work is concerned with what she calls the “apocalyptic sublime”, using hypnotic, dystopian imagery to confront the threat of climate change and humanity's capacity for self-destruction.
In 2009 Richardson received a National Arts Award from Americans for the Arts, alongside honorees including the artist Ed Ruscha.Her video triptych “Haunted” at Void Gallery in Derry in 2014 paired Mariner 9 (2012), a life-size panorama of a ruined Martian landscape still populated by decaying rover technology, with Orion Tide (2013) and Exiles of the Shattered Star (2006), in which balls of fire fall over England's Lake District.
In 2017 her exhibition “The Weather Makers” at Dundee Contemporary Arts, her first solo show in Scotland, took its title from Tim Flannery's book on climate change. It included the series Pillars of Dawn (2015-17), C-prints showing barren, ash-coated trees that glow like diamonds against a dark sky.In its crystallised landscapes, Richardson placed one crystal for every species alive today, a labour intended to prompt reflection on mass extinction.
Her film Embers and the Giants, which shows thousands of drones mimicking a natural spectacle, was shown as part of “Human Nature” at York Mediale in 2020.Richardson later extended Pillars of Dawn into NFT editions on Tezos,and in 2021 her piece Pillars of a Dawn (I) featured on “The FEN”, a gallery on Hic et Nunc presented by the artist Joanie Lemercier to showcase artists new to the blockchain.In 2024 her work joined the environmental digital art platform Blueshift's collection of 100 artworks, alongside artists including John Gerrard and Joanie Lemercier.,
