What is truth? This year’s Ealing Autumn Festival is asking you to ponder that question and others at a travelling art exhibition that is about to start touring libraries across the borough.

The 2016 festival’s theme is Truth and Reconciliation and the exhibition has been created by a group of Hanwell-based artists, in conjunction with Ealing Council’s libraries and CCS (Cultural Community Solutions), which manages them on the council’s behalf.

It is going to run all the way through to January – taking in libraries right across the borough as it does so.

Although the exhibition opens at Ealing Central Library on Saturday (18 April), an official opening event will be held there on Saturday, 23 April between 1-4pm. It will have a special focus on Shakespeare to celebrate his life on the 400th anniversary of his death. Quotations from his plays and his sonnets that relate to the festival’s theme will be placed alongside the exhibition. Everyone will have the chance to make their own letters from fabric and different kinds of paper at a craft workshop in order to create a collage to display the words: Truth and Reconciliation.

The festival’s artistic director Gillian Spragg said: ” Each library will have its own ‘open day’ during the course of the touring exhibition where local residents and library visitors can make a special visit and try out a variety of arts and craftwork with accompanying talks and story-telling.”

The artists involved are Maggie Le Rougetel (in main picture), Naomi Healy (pictured above), Samantha Rough and Helen Tyler, all of whom contributed to last year’s Magna Carta exhibition, assisted by aspiring young artist Batrisyie Hussain. They are part of the 4020 Art Group based at the council’s Hanwell Community Centre.

Venues and dates

The exhibition is free to enter and will be at Ealing Central Library first, from 18 April to 5 May; it will then move on to:

• Acton Library (7-26 May)
• Jubilee Gardens Library (28 May-16 June)
• Perivale Library (18 June-7 July)
• Hanwell Library (9-21 July)
• Greenford Library (23 July-4 August)
• Northolt Leisure Centre Library (6 August-1 September)
• Northolt Library (3-15 September)
• Pitshanger Library (17-29 September)
• Ealing Central Library (1-27 October)
• Southall Library (29 October-17 November)
• Northfields Library (19 November-1 December)
• West Ealing Library (3-15 December)
• Wood End Library (17 December-12 January).

Get more information at your local library or at www.ealingautumnfestival.co.uk