GOSPORT.- Following a major refurbishment project, Gosport Museum and Art Gallery opened its doors to the public on Tuesday 22 November.

Situated on Gosport’s High Street, the former Old Grammar School has been transformed following a significant capital works project, with a new museum for the town, a new community gallery, new café, enlarged Play Gallery for under-fives and enhanced learning rooms to cater for the venue’s extensive schools and learning programme.

Gosport Museum and Art Gallery, which is operated by Hampshire Cultural Trust, opened with a specially commissioned new video artwork exhibition created by Portsmouth-based artists, Heinrich & Palmer.

Alien Native reveals plant life from the local area using a unique and fascinating technique. The installation is a film, which has been edited to create a multi-channel projection onto a large, translucent screen hung from the ceiling space in the building’s main gallery, Gosport Gallery. Inspired by plants growing locally and Hampshire Cultural Trust’s botany, or herbarium, collection – which consists of 27,000 specimens, principally collected from across the county – the exhibition explores so-called alien plants, introduced by human activity, and their native counterparts, which are either indigenous species, or arrived ‘naturally’ in Britain and Ireland following the end of the Ice Age.

The installation creates an immersive and otherworldly experience which explores the subtle nature and movements of plant life and our attempts to capture, study and understand it and will be accompanied by specimens from the herbarium collection.

Tara McKinney Marinus, Visual Arts Exhibitions Manager at Hampshire Cultural Trust, says: “At such an exciting time for the opening of Gosport Museum and Art Gallery following its refurbishment, this is a perfect opportunity to introduce an ambitious series of specially selected artist commissions to celebrate the Gosport area. Working with such nationally significant artists responding to the depth of our collections will offer our visitors both immersive and thought-provoking experiences, as well as simply joyful new encounters with contemporary art in the gallery.’