TO MARK the start of its ambitious Festival of Islesolation, local arts and health charity, Independent Arts has announced the opening of an exciting new online gallery space.

The new gallery and studio will become home to the Festival of Islesolation, which the charity hopes the community will visit and create work for.

Artists are invited to submit commissions for micro-projects, with successful candidates showing ideas that best interpret their experience of lockdown and engage their communities.

Independent Arts chief executive, Lisa Gagliani, said: “Since opening our People’s Pop Up Gallery in 2019 we have discovered the importance of community submitting and viewing art made by people like them.

“Our new cyberspace home is exciting because it is vast, we can triple or quadruple our current gallery space and free ourselves from the constraints of a physical building.

“We are thankful to Arts Council England for funding this online gallery space.”

The gallery rooms will be named after Island luminaries. The Julia Margaret Cameron Gallery will house photography, film and media while The Alfred Lord Tennyson Gallery will be used for poetry and creative writing.

There will be a gallery housing the charity’s permanent collection, a sculpture gallery and a dedicated gallery showcasing work produced as part of the festival and in direct response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Operations manager Hannah Griffiths said: “The most exciting part of the space will be The De Fortibus gallery. This will show work curated by local people.”

The gallery can be viewed online here.