HHPL Hosts Meet the Artist for Local Child Photographer Rio Kingstone

Meet Rio Kingstone, our May Cultural Corner artist.

Every month, our library features a different artist's work in our Cultural Corner display. Over the years, these displays have ranged from paintings, sculptures, greeting cards, miniature models, costumes, photographs, and more.

For the month of May, our spotlight artist was Rio Kingstone, who enjoys photography as a hobby. (He also enjoys taking apart computers and had a really cool photo of the inside of a motherboard, which at a glance could almost be mistaken for an aerial shot of a city.) We asked him to come to the library on May 24th for a "Meet the Artist," event to discuss his work and invited the Grade 4/5 class from Maynooth Public School to attend.

Librarian Nancy getting the students ready for Rio's Q&A period.

Like any art gallery showing, students had time to walk around and look at Rio's photos, talk amongst each other about them, and enjoy some snacks provided by the library. Once this mingling period was over, they sat down and waited for Nancy to introduce Rio and officially launch the Q&A period.

When asked about when he first started taking photos, Rio couldn't quite remember, but according to his mother, this was probably because he had been so young when he first started playing with cameras. Eventually he started editing his old photos with an app on his father's phone, changing the colours and appearance.

A photograph Rio took of his older brother.

It wasn't until he took this photo of his older brother that his family realized he had an eye for this sort of thing and got him his own camera to encourage the hobby.

We are happy to have been the first location to exhibit Rio's work, but already know we won't be the last - Rio has had his application accepted to display his work at another exhibit in the city and we wish him all the best there as well.

As a parting message to the students who attended, CEO Rod Moffitt encouraged them to try new things and explore where their own interests might lie and what hobbies they might be able to nurture, whether it be photography or something totally different. When that time comes, if it's something we can put on display, we'd love to have them show off their work as well!

Thanks Rio for sharing your work with us!