| During the summer of 2004, Shadric Toop, a Brighton based artist, spent two weeks photographing Sri Lanka. Six months later the world was shaken by the images and press stories of the largest global natural disaster in living memory. The following April, Toop returned to Sri Lanka to photograph the country and people again, and to meet some of the survivors, not just of the tsunami, but of the devastating recession that had settled over the country due to the lack of tourism since the disaster. Gerard Weber, a Sri Lankan from Negombo, was his tour driver and translator on both trips.
The photographs and stories gathered during 7 days in April 2005, combined with observations of the UK media’s response to the tsunami and the flawed aid effort that followed have become the basis for Toop’s first solo show as an artist. Toop’s work combines collage, photography, drawing, writing and painting often in the same pieces and on a large scale.
The work will be on display in Brighton at the Crane Kalman Gallery, opening on December 26th 2005, the anniversary of the tsunami. Limited edition prints will be on sale, with profits going directly to help build houses in one particularly devastated fishing village Totumana Matare, whose survivors feature in the work.The fund raising will be managed by the charity Help Lanka (Registered as a UK charity No. 1110306).
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