THE work of highly respected Lakeland artist Ian Walton is an important contribution to the Holocaust and Memory Reframed programme that includes significant artists from throughout Europe.

Running from September 9 until October 29 in the Lake District Holocaust Project's (LDHP) first floor space at Windermere Library, is Breath Becomes Air, an installation/exhibition created by Ian, that skilfully uses found objects and material.

A master of capturing the emotion that a place or time evokes, Ian's artistic concerns ally closely to certain aspects of LDHP and its attempt to deal with the changing nature of Holocaust memorialisation and commemoration.

Ian has travelled to locations in Krakow and Prague where he visited Auschwitz Birkenau and Theresienstadt, and his trip to Budapest in Hungary led to him seeing aspects of Holocaust memorialisation that influenced his use of shoes as an important element of the installation on show at the library.

LDHP is a unique initiative that has been working since 2005 to commemorate the moving connection between 300 child Holocaust survivors and the area around Windermere that was their first UK home in 1945.

And apparently Ian made his European journeys unknowingly at the same time as LDHP was emerging in Windermere, a synchronicity heightened by the fact that that there were children from Poland and Hungary among those who were rehabilitated in 1945 at Calgarth, near Windermere; many had passed through Auschwitz before being finally liberated from Theresienstadt.

Director Trevor Avery says that Ian's work has a quality that has always spoken to him in some acute way: "It's a visual representation of the many aspects that I have dealt with and come across for many years now; a kind of melancholia that is a necessary part of coming to terms with events of enormous tragedy."