A Belfast artist's charity has opened its first self-hosted exhibition, eight months after its premises were destroyed in the blaze at Old Cathedral Buildings in Belfast.
Digital Arts Studios saw its facilities and equipment wiped out by the fire, after having adapted to get through the pandemic years.
DAS allows artists access to a shared studio space through its residencies programme and rents out the equipment they need to create their works.
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Richard Davis from the studios said that it had been a very difficult and stressful time getting their operation back up and running.
"It's been a bit of a wild ride," he said.
"I think the first immediate thing was just getting over the shock, the loss of the facilities and the equipment from down through the years.
"The main priority for us was just getting new premises, which we were able to do on the same street on Donegall Street, which was great and then starting to rebuild our resources and our equipment."
The fire had a huge impact on the help they were able to offer local artists, and Richard said they had been forced to build it all up again from scratch.
"Whenever the fire occurred, we had to just cancel the home artists residency that we had, as obviously we weren't able to provide anything," he added.
"It took many months before we were able to get a new residency scheme up and running, but it's been back up since April now.
"Even just furniture, we didn't have tables or chairs, never mind a computer to put on it.
"It was a very stressful period and it was only when we launched the new new round of residents, we have four working with us at the moment, that we felt that we were able to get back to our work.|"
While acknowledging the trauma and stress the blaze had caused the charity, Richard said they had also seen the best of people in their response.
"The community, the community of artists in Belfast, the Arts Council, Belfast City Council, were so brilliant at reaching out and offering a hand in any way they could," he said.
"Cathedral Quarter BID even let us use their space as desk space the odd time, so the generosity and support was incredible.
"There were donations too and we were getting those directly and that helped us immensely too."
Richard said they had been able to secure new premises which actually allowed them to host exhibitions and workshops for the first time.
"There's two silver linings, the main one really is that we found a space that's two floors and two rooms.
"It's meant for the first time we can use one of those rooms as an exhibition space.
"On Thursday night we had our first main exhibition of work as part of Late Night Art, it was a really busy launch, I think we had about 120 people through the doors, so that's great.
"It's a room where we can do workshops or if artists want to test out ideas before they exhibit there or somewhere else and Thursday night really showed the benefits of that."
He said the exhibition managed to pack a lot into their new space and encouraged people to come down and see for themselves, with it finishing up on 1 June.
"The exhibition is eight artists showing work that they've done through the last eight months with us and showing off what they've learned with us," he said.
"There's some projection mapping and some interactive art that you touch and it produces an animation, there's some installation work and some audio pieces, so there's quite a nice little selection of work.
"It's a cosy space, but it's a really nice collection of eight artists' work."
To find out more about the exhibition you can visit the DAS Website.
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