News

David Shearing is an award-winning artist who creates immersive multimedia installations. His recent work, The Rising Sun, a building filled with light and voices, stopped Romford in its tracks when it was situated in the town centre earlier this year. Designed to represent a public house, The Rising Sun space offered a magical environment to experience, while listening to the recorded stories of the people of Romford. Now the artist has found another intriguing space to invite visitors and stimulate conversation. For his Blueprint Festival event at Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch, Shearing presents This Story is True for Most of Us, on 23 and 24 September. It will take place (weather permitting) on the roof of our recently grade-II listed building. Shearing says: 'I can’t wait to get people up there to gaze over the rooftops of Hornchurch, all the way towards Dartford in one direction, and London in another.' He will seat visitors - an intimate maximum gathering of 12 for each performance - at a 10-metre long table set up on the roof for five brief plant-based tasting moments, while he leads them via headphones towards some of the most challenging climate questions of our time. 'Each tasting moment is designed to question our relationship with the natural world,” Shearing says. “Expect little bursts of flavour and a deconstruction of food to its simplest form.' This Story is True For Most Of Us is presented by Shearing in collaboration with designer Paul Burgess and the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch’s Environmental Responsibility Group. More than anything, This Story Is True For Most Of Us in a project created to inspire conversation about the environment. Shearing says: 'This project invites us to look at the details, to examine our relationship with plants and how they shape us, to take a breath. Being on the rooftop enables us to zoom out, to see it all from a distance, away from the hustle of everyday life. Food offers us a way to be together, to break bread with a stranger and propose a toast to a new future - it will be a very special experience.' Mathew Russell, Chief Executive of Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch adds: 'We are thrilled that David Shearing has found a way to open up to festival-goers such a privileged view from our roof. Blueprint as a festival was always conceived as a theatre-takeover, using every space of the building, bringing every corner to life with theatre and art and letting visitors into bits of it they haven’t seen before.' A free exhibition of prints with video from Shearing’s The Rising Sun also runs in Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch foyer throughout Blueprint, 12 - 24 September.   Click here to book