‘Through a long family history of agricultural labourers, I find myself caught between Wordsworth and the Sheppard, admiring the land but simultaneously not seeing it. The result of this relationship is an ontological exploration into aesthetics and a reconsideration of the (re) presentation of the land as photographic image.’

Dave Ball: Being Somewhere

Being Somewhere was initially developed as documentation in blog-form of a series of daily visits to the open countryside near Worpswede in Northwest Germany. The resulting video charts the progress (or lack of it) of the artist's attempts to visualise the landscape, to find ways of acting within it, and to form coherent thoughts about his experiences. The video is divided into eight sections, each representing a single day. www.daveballartist.co.uk/beingsomewhere

Dave Ball Biography

Paul Becker: Sleeper

‘I used to try and make images appear from under the palimpsests of previous failures, like an archaeologist in reverse. In the last year, since I have begun to make miniatures on zinc and copper, the paintings have, to my mind, broken free. Now each image represents a few hours or a day of highly concentrated abstract thinking (or non-thinking) about each particular subject. There is no opportunity for reworking and no thought left over for continuity just as there is little that is necessarily consistent in the progress of a reverie.’

Paul Becker Biography

Ronnie Close: A Hard Place

Ronnie Close’s practice uses video and photographic works to look at the formation of historical narratives. Currently this focuses on the motif of martyrdom in the 1981 Irish Republican Hunger Strikes in order to examine the complex relationship between myth versus historical truth and one’s reading of political events. His practice investigates the visual slippage between appearance and artifice in the construction of meaning and the role of photographic veracity in this process. Images can exist paradoxically as both fictional-fantasy and factual-realism but rarely reveal their means of production or break the illusion. The art practice visually responds to historical incidents to usefully disrupt a sense of cohesion amongst competing if latent beliefs. Visually the art practice asks questions of what we know and how we think we know it, as means to discuss consciousness and the limits of knowledge itself.

Ronnie Close Biography

Ronnie Close is an Irish photographic artist and academic currently based in Bristol. Since 2004 he has been developing an extensive body of visual artwork as part of a practice-led PhD that looks at the issue of martyrdom. He has participated in video and photographic exhibitions and screenings throughout Ireland, the UK, Europe, USA, Canada and Syria. Exhibitions include: Night Time Room, Picture This (2010) Bristol; Northern Bounds, Videographe Art Centre, Montreal, Canada (2007); The Most Curatorial Biennial of the Universe, Apexarts, New York, USA (2007); AVE - Art Video Exchange - Festival, Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway (2007); The 9th Syrian Photography Festival (2006); Photo London, International Photography Fair (2006); Darklight Film Festival, Irish Film Institute, Dublin (2006). Close has been published in several journals, including the Source Magazine and Journal for Media Practice. He co-founded the artist's group, Format, and is a trustee and studio artist at Spike Island, Bristol.  Currently he is a Senior Lecturer in Photographic Art and a member of the European Centre For Photographic Research at the University of Wales, Newport.  www.ronnieclose.com/

Gary Colclough: Lighter Than Itself

‘Recently I’ve been drawn to the idea of an encounter as a way of thinking about approaching an image as it contains notions of unexpectedness and also a certain difficulty. Central to my investigation is the depiction of the outdoors, which I present as drawn images built into wooden structures and combined with projections.

These constructions create orchestrated viewing points in which the image functions as an element within a spatial and temporal arrangement. Images speak to us about the appearance of things but sculpture often speaks to us about things themselves and I’m interested in this gap, between what is represented and what is presented, and the ways in which it can be mediated.’

Gary Colclough Biography

Richard Cook: 91

‘Feigned ownership, a proud nudity, and aesthetic awkwardness, and an overall futility that bring together space, weight, and materials in ways that seems happily accidental. What may appear as the casual and passive, I attempt to bring out hidden or overlooked details, allowing surprisingly complex moments of explanation. The attention to placement and accompanying images and text should introduce the viewer into my intention and process and present an ‘epical forged cheque on the public’. The ‘blanks’ that exist, in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately most prominent. In the context of the near-collapse of our contemporary socio-political reality, my work should also quietly promote an economy of scale, means, re-use, transparency, and the power and beauty of bare essentials.’

Richard Cook Biography

Born in Edinburgh in 1986, Richard studied and received a First Class Bachelor's Honours in Sculpture from the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. During his time there he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany as part of an internal student exchange and was a collective administrator of the short-lived artist-run initiative 'modular 9'.

Since graduation, he has moved to Leeds to follow an internship at the arts initiative Axis (www.axisweb.org) to help understand the structures of the environment he practices within. He was short-listed and exhibited for Channel 4/Saatchi Gallery New Sensations and for the Tallinn triennial KNOW HOW, both in 2009 and has recently participated in a group show at the supercollider gallery in Blackpool.

Ellie Davies: Smoke and Mirrors 2

Throughout the history of landscape painting the natural world has been invested with complex themes and metaphors that obscure and overlay the landscape with additional meaning, directly reflecting the preoccupations and anxieties of the culture they were produced in.

These images occupy the gap between the notion of beauty and reality. The gold trees are alluring and reference the often-kitsch construction of the landscape as beautiful, which obscures the actuality of the land as threatened and exploited by the demands of an ever-growing consumer society. The gold covered trees sparkle with a seductive opulent sheen, but they are unable to survive.

Ellie Davies Biography

Afshin Dehkordi: Untitled and Untitled

Afshin Dehkordi’s life was formed from Iran’s turbulent history. Using the camera he captures the migration of memory; anchoring a sense of self in a history that should have been.

Afshin Dehkordi Biography

Katayoun Dowlatshahi: Liminal IV

‘The work selected for ArtSway is one of a series of works that I have entitled Liminal. Significant in all my work is the intrinsic nature of light and ones experience of it, either in an abstract spatial sense or through formal imagery. Liminal is a body of work that explores the visible interplay of light and shadow on the threshold of conscious experience. There is ephemeral beauty in the world we inhabit; a liminal state almost too subtle or faint to knowingly experience and sometimes so overwhelming that we become immersed by the experience, unable to define it. I have tried to foster a new understanding by exploring these virtually hidden facets through the combined application of photography and drawing.’

Katayoun Dowlatshahi Biography

Katayoun Dowlatshahi an Iranian-born British artist working in contemporary photographic art, drawing, architectural glass and time based media. Trained in Edinburgh, Winchester and Barcelona with a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Gloucestershire, she has worked on a number of national and international residencies, exhibitions and has a number of public realm commissions across the UK. At present she is working on three significant public commissions in Bletchley, adjacent to Bletchley Park, Gloucester Docks and Canterbury city centre. Dowlatshahi was recently awarded an Arts Council England Award for research and development to aid in the production of new work based on the theme ‘Liminal’ for a forthcoming solo show in Northampton and Portsmouth.

Pippa Gatty: My Everest Adventure

‘Epic stories of discovery and exploration is the foundation of my work. I rely heavily on literary accounts, photographic archives and film footage of this material, which I appropriate and amend. I have been evidencing my involvement within this material through painting, collage, film and installation. The work engages a suspension of disbelief and a documentary approach. Installation is often the conclusion to this enquiry, and a misinterpretation of the science fact.

The role of theatre, and the act of pretending and believing are all addressed within the wider work, standing within an arena that straddles a suspension of disbelief, and of an empirical, pseudo scientific area where processes are revealed.’ 

Pippa Gatty Biography

Robert Lang: Plot, Seeing Place and Substitute

‘My work engages with the potential of images, particularly the with(drawn) and painted image. As a starting point, I work from low quality found images – this kind of image leaves space for furthering them in different contexts and I am interested in the act of re-venerating them through their presentation; the formal and technical devices offered by drawing and painting.

The images I select to work with relate to the facets of presentation and its complications. Presentation of the image; the painting; the materiality; the self; the other, these are all factors that I consider to be crucial towards a reading of my art practice. I attempt to understand this logic by putting forward a position that is enactive, performative, spectative, analytical and suspect – a position that is then naturally repeated and mimicked by the viewer.

Robert Lang Biography

Tom Lovelace: Red Trolley and Machine Study (both from the series Unit 2)

The depicted objects have been constructed for the camera. They are based upon imagined, anonymous and functionally ‘false’ structures that explore the points at which the mundane teeters upon fantastical within the somewhat rigid and controlled forms of the industrial landscape.

The series is conceptualised around the creation of a new machine typology. Reversing the idea of ‘function equals form’ to ‘form equals function’. My practice fuses photography with sculpture and acts of intervention. I am interested in manufacturing the subject matter. (The constructions are life-sized).

Tom Lovelace Biography

Moira Lovell: Untitled 3 and Untitled 4

Moira Lovell uses her photography to investigate the relationships between social change and personal experience. Engaging with subjects in different settings Lovell explores notions of identity at both individual and group levels. We still stand is an on-going body of work that provides a commentary on perceptions of social status and the socio-political factors that affects communities once dominated by coal mining. In these works contemporary miners are photographed as they emerge from the lift shaft at the end of their working day. Individual faces are picked out of the darkness reminding us that even after the events of 1984/5 men are still proudly mining Britain's subterranean landscapes. Working in sweltering heat and deafening noise, inhaling coal dust with every breath – it is these very conditions that have influenced this series

Moira Lovell Biography

Suzanne Moxhay: Rains Mine and Migration

‘The distortion of photographic imagery is a theme carried through my current work. Through a restless reprocessing of found imagery I create environments that become detached form the photographic, that exist in a space between photography and the staged or theatrical. Each image is derived from a three dimensional collage of cut outs sourced from an extensive archive of collected material from the 1950s to the present day. From the photograph, to the print, to the three dimensional set in the studio, and then back again to the photograph, imagery is continually moved through real and illusory space. The idealized, whilst dystopian environments created then exist in a space between different fields of representation whilst also embodying a reality of their own.

Suzanne Moxhay Biography

Suzanne Moxhay (b. 1976, Essex) lives and works in London. After completing a BA (Hons) in Painting at Chelsea College of Art she went on to The Royal Academy Schools where she graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art in 2007. She was then selected for a yearlong residency at the Florence Trust Studios, London where she developed her series of photographic works Borderlands. She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally since 2002 and her work is held in many significant public and private collections including the University of the Arts Collection, The Cooper Union New York, the FSC and the Lodevans Collection.

Andrew Rowe: Enlarged Jack Plug

‘Currently I produce work with visual and sound based media by using varying methods of sound creation and employment. In recent years I have combined these visual and aural practices to produce works that address personal and observed perceptions of sonic art in gallery spaces.  I believe some sonic art needs an appropriate visual accompaniment and has to be controlled or segregated from other works in these spaces to be most effective. I attempt to address this issue by making installations that remain silent until the audience interacts with them in various ways and yet they can still be appreciated visually. www.slatepipe.co.uk

Andrew Rowe Biography

Andrew Rowe lives and works in London. In 1996 his interest in sound led to employment as a sound technician in the audiovisual industry. During this period his free time was spent making music and sound pieces both alone and through collaboration while building a large collection of instruments and sound making devices. His work received airplay from the BBC, Resonance fm and WFMU in New York. He also produced paintings that were shown in two Stoke Newington festival group exhibitions. He developed and still runs a small-scale Internet record label that releases work by himself and similar artists.

In 2006 he decided to leave full time employment to formally pursue his creative sound practice and spent the next three years studying for a degree in sonic art at Middlesex University. Since his degree show in June 2009 he has displayed work in the Herbert gallery in Coventry and has had video pieces shown at independent short film nights in London.

Dolly Thompsett: Night Flight

Dolly Thompsett creates intricate, tablet-like paintings by building up layers of paint interspersed with glassy resin laminates that allow the image to weave through the surface. Her detailed rendering, mysterious atmospheres and glistening textures allude to the high-gloss of Hollywood movies coupled with the traditions of Romantic painting.

By taking as their starting point photographs of both historical and recent events where ordinary people are overcome by extraordinary circumstances, her epic paintings articulate a moment of transformation or transcendence filtered through the artist’s reflective subjectivity. Layering together special effects to express a sense of epiphany, each of Thompsett’s works is rendered most intimate through her use of paint, and most seductive through her sampling of popular visual culture.

Thompsett’s new paintings of intensely charged moments set against the eternal majesty of the universe are simultaneously meditations on the limitations of representational painting. Dark voids, celestial sweeps and misty phosphorescence engulf the vanishing traces of narrative still extant in the work. In her visionary worlds the conceptual, the psychological and the social mutate and figures melt, fade and dematerialize within grand, fantastical landscapes.

Dolly Thompsett Biography

Dolly Thompsett was born in 1969 in London. She trained at Byam Shaw (MA Fine Art 2000) and Goldsmiths College (Practice based PhD Fine Art in 2004).

She has had solo shows at Ritter/Zamet (2009 and 2005) and Fred [London] Gallery (2007). Recent group exhibitions include The Jerwood Drawing Prize (2008/9), Golden Record (2009, touring), Aspex, (2007), Salon Nouveau, Engholm Englehorn, Vienna (2007), The Wonderful Fund Collection on Tour, Pallant House, Chichester and Museum of Marrakech (2006) and When I lived in Modern Times, Northern Gallery of Contemporary (2006).

Noam Toran & Onkar Kular: The MacGuffin Library

The MacGuffin Library (2008) is inspired by a term attributed to Alfred Hitchcock. The MacGuffin is a cinematic plot device that serves to set and keep a story in motion despite lacking intrinsic importance. Famous examples include the statue from The Maltese Falcon, and the glowing suitcase from Kiss Me Deadly.

The MacGuffin Library is a collection of 16 film synopses and accompanying objects constructed out of black polymer resin. The work addresses a range of themes stemming from the artists’ interests: Re-enactments, forgeries, urban myths, the defining of high and low brow cinema, alternative histories, and the relationship between media and memory.

http://noamtoran.com/NT2009/projects/the-macguffin-library

Noam Toran Biography

Noam Toran was born in 1975 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His work spans multiple disciplines and mediums, primarily involving the creation of objects and films that reflect upon the intersection between cinema, design and psychology. Consistently, the work appropriates the discourse of design as a means with which to envision anomalies in contemporary human behaviour. The works, whether presented in films or installations, are imagined as constructions for particular individuals and psyches, vehicles for an elaboration of the desires, fantasies and pathologies unique to specific modern subjects. His work is exhibited, screened and published internationally, and is part of the NY MoMA and FRAC Ile-de-France collections. He currently teaches at the Royal College of Art and lectures worldwide.

Onkar Kular Biography

Susan Trangmar: A Play in Time

A Play in Time is a video work filmed in St Anne’s Well Gardens in Hove, historically the site of one of the first British film studios set up by George Albert Smith in the 1890's. The video explores the activities that take place within a public space of recreation, celebrating the incidental and the everyday. Interweaving off screen sound with a doubling of visual image it meshes seasonal and chronological change with subjective experiences of the passing of time, drawing attention to the play between perception, memory and reverie. A Play in Time is a Photoworks commission in association with Brighton and Hove Arts Commission.

Susan Trangmar Biography

Alex Veness: Olga and Nadya

The tentacles of capital extend not only geographically into the former spaces of state socialism, but now bring love and hope itself within their orbit. The series Neo-Love depicts women whose age is indistinct and life unknown. Their images are derived from a website for women from Samara, a former industrial city in Russia in which many women seek husbands as an escape from their poverty and deprivation. Their plaintive poses form the face of a new realism in the global political and economic order.

Alex Veness Biography

Alex Veness was born in England in 1965 and grew up in London and Spain. He studied Illustration at Chelsea School of Art, graduating in 1987. He lived in Mexico City until 1990. He graduated in MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 1994 and was subsequently granted the Delfina Studio Trust Award. He has continued to live and work in London, exhibiting in solo and group shows both in the UK and internationally.

Although fundamentally a painter, Veness also uses a custom-built camera called Xenon-Eye. Leap-frogging the 20th century, this absurd device fuses a large Victorian camera with a 21st century scanner to produce a genuinely new form of time-based visual aesthetic. Xenon-Eye can be described as a machine that sees the world with emotion and expression, as if it were an artist.

In 2006, Veness and Richard Barbrook formed the Class Wargames collective to perform Guy Debord’s Game of War as a public demonstration of revolutionary strategy. Class Wargames has performed widely; venues include the Hermitage, St.Petersburg, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. In 2009, Veness contributed to the production of a short film of Debord’s Game of War, funded by Arts Council England. www.alexveness.net

Fabien Villon: Meteorite

Fabien Villon’s work refers to the problematic relationship between time passing, and death. Irreversibility is at the heart of his work – accident in particular. Starting from a consequence to a form of creation is a way to create – almost back to front, similar to a ‘refurbishing’. Shown like a celestial stone or a sculpture, Villion’s Meteorite is in fact a burnt windscreen from a car crash, that has melted to form a solid lump. The manner in which the work is displayed – on a plinth, underneath a Perspex box – is to emphasise it being an actual meteorite.

Fabien Villon Biography

Kate Walters: Sentinel

‘Sentinel is a drawing that expresses how I felt when I used to sit in my horse’s stable, beneath her neck. I would look up and see her dozing, but protective and huge, above me. Years later when she had foals I saw her standing over them in this way.

My watercolour drawings explore themes relating to childhood, loss, the search for truth/higher consciousness and safety. The image of the horse has been used for millennia to denote the authentic voice of the cells; but I only discovered this very recently.

When I begin to draw I have no idea what is going to happen on the paper: I try to release my hands from the ego and trust that what occurs and appears will give expression to an inner voice. Every drawing I make must open a new door, show me something I couldn’t see before; expand my consciousness in some way.’

Kate Walter Biography

Born near London, Kate was educated at Byam Shaw, Brighton and Falmouth Colleges of Art. She has spent much of her adult life working in education, and since 1997 she has concentrated on her practice.

Her drawings have been short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2003 and 2008 and have been selected for many juried shows including Visual Exhibition for Arts of Ideas II, curated by Stephen Snoddy, in Birmingham, 2009; The Drawing Show at the Exchange (2008), Penzance, curated by Mary Doyle and Kate Macfarlane of the Drawing Room London; Images of the Divine at Orleans House Gallery in 2007; The Sefton Open in 2004 and 2006; The Royal Academy Summer Show in 2006, Discerning Eye in 2002 and 2006, and ArtSway Open in 2005. She is currently showing a film/installation about the last weeks of her father’s life, in a collaborative project at The Exchange in Penzance (until 9 January, 2010). She has twice been the recipient of major awards from Arts Council England South West. Publications include numerous catalogues and essays by Professor Penny Florence, Partou Zia and Rupert Loydell, and a review by Laura Gascoigne in November 2008 Galleries magazine. Kate lives in Cornwall.  www.katewalters.co.uk

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa: Test Passages

‘I am interested in what and in how we remember. I am specifically interested in what certain shared or public accounts of the past might reveal about commonly held beliefs and values. Test Passages (2008) brings together archive newsreel footage of the two of the most culturally visible migrations to occur in post-war Britain: the arrivals of immigrants from the Caribbean and the departure of emigrants for Australia. These migrations were more or less simultaneous – the demographic similarity of the migrants was considerable – and yet, these movements of people occupy markedly different spaces in Britain’s collective post-war narrative(s).’

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa Biography