A special pop-up art exhibition featuring artwork by children resettled from the Chernobyl area to Ukraine will open to the public this Friday 10th June in the old Methodist Church on Laurence Street in Drogheda, for this weekend only.
On the 26th April, 1986 reactor unit 4 of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy station exploded, causing history’s worst nuclear disaster, and sending a huge radiation cloud across Belarus, Ukraine and Europe. Four million metres of barbed wire now surrounds the reactor – the Exclusion Zone.
During a humanitarian visit in September 1996, Drogheda woman Isobel Sanroma, visited a rural primary school near Chernobyl where children had been resettled from the Exclusion Zone.
Teachers in that school asked their 5th and 6th grade students to illustrate through art how the explosion affected them. The beautiful and moving art they produced and gifted to Isobel captures the children’s feelings and imagination.
Isobel has extended an open invitation for all to visit the exhibition over the weekend, saying: “These recently rediscovered paintings, along with a collection of photographs of the Exclusion Zone villages, now emerge on public display for the first time, to remind us that the children are in trouble again: history is repeating itself“.
Almost 300,000 people were displaced across the Soviet Union by the Chernobyl explosion. “A further humanitarian disaster now unfolds in Ukraine, killing, scattering and pauperising its civilians“, Isobel added.
Adi Roche and Chernobyl Children International (CCI) work to mitigate the suffering from the 1986 disaster. Isobel leads the CCI Drogheda branch, with loyal support from the people of Drogheda, Dundalk and their surrounding areas.
The exhibition, whichis suppported by Drogheda & District Chamber, is open to the public in the old Methodist Church, Laurence Street, Drogheda on Friday 10th June (12 – 5pm), Saturday 11th June (12-5pm) and Sunday 12th June (12-5pm).
