Canadian artist Kelly Richardson (*1972) belongs to a new generation of artists working with digital technologies to create hyperreal, symbolically highly charged landscapes. Her series of digitally-born works Pillars of Dawn imagines a desert landscape in which environmental conditions have crystallised the terrain. The series presents a scenario in which we might have to look beyond our current planet for refuge and survival, and they raise myriad questions about how we arrived as such a moment of environmental crisis.

Text by: Sarah Cook, Madeleine Kennedy, Alistair Robinson, Emily Stamey, Carmen Victor