.Charlotte Bracegirdle
.Hands 2007
.Oil on Bought Picture 46 x 61 cm

My work is based around the subtle traces that we leave behind. When a person no longer occupies a space everything appears different, but visually nothing is altered.
Everything looks, smells and feels as it was when that person was there. But the image is not the same despite evidence telling you that it is.
The pictures become empty stages, deserted and uncanny – left only with hints of past activity. When talking about the story behind the movie ‘Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind', where people can have their memories erased, Pierre Bismuth comments: What situations would arise as a result and how would you deal with those possibilities?
For me, all activity – art, film etc – are traces that occupy space, even if you are only trying to do something simple. By erasing you are simply adding.
Charlotte Bracegirdle

This is one in a series of works investigating the complexities and similarities between naïveté and sagacity, and the significance and value of childhood. I was struck by the uninhibited mark making in a drawing I did in 1970 and the simple, yet vital, decisions I had made.
Everything about it seemed integral, and it was this carefree confidence that captivated me. By copying the drawing using embroidery, (a curiously competitive exercise), I have tried to even out the playing field – a nod somehow to the journey between ignorance and expertise.
This repetition of the sketch highlights a loss of time and innocence. There is a paradox hidden here somewhere, the implied impossibility of being in two places at once. And although there is a sadness in creating a then and a now, there is also a hint of a suggestion of all that lies in between. Julie Cockburn

Oona Culley Shadow Memory
2006 Oil on canvas, twig & plinth
175 x 120 x 35 cm

Last leaves on the tree whose unseen presence echoes
as a memory. Shadows of what's gone
still remain in the present as if time compressed.
Oona Culley

Lee Edwards
Weeping Pillow 2007
Etched Photograph 15 x 10 cm

The intimate spaces of Edwards' work bear a lot of personal weight, recalling family life and personal relationships. There is a duality of presence and absence that occurs within the work and the surface of the photograph is scratched away in thin layers; creating new and displaced spaces beyond the walls and carpets.
Lee Edwards

Karin Eklund Even in the Midst of Chaos
2009 Oil on Banking Paper 53 x 38 cm

A fictional reality of arrested narratives
with menacing undertones,
created as a collage of found
and imagined images.
Karin Eklund


Karin Now resides in the Isle of Mull which is around 3 hours drive from Glasgow on the west coast of Scotland. I would imagine Russell met Karin back in the 90's when she was linked to the Delfina Projects Space in London Brige.
Harry Pye

Stewart Gough
Fallen Warrior 2009

“What Francis Bacon would have made if he had gone to Homebase, is what I'm thinking, looking at Stewart Gough's Fallen Warrior. It's something to do with the face – or that piping which plunges into (or out of) where the face should be – that gives it that (crispy) Bacon flavour. The Fallen Warrior series is probably the most visceral and disturbing of Stewart's works, though most of his output seems to have a sense of menace about it: whether it's a small contraption which looks like a bomb disposal machine, or a huge brooding drainpipe alien being which sits, silent as a praying mantis, ready to start moving around in the middle of the gallery. It should be comical all this stuff – drainpipes and dinner plates and tubing and DIY bits, but the overall effect is more troubling and unsettling. Russell Herron Journal, 2009

Tim Knowles
Graveyard Tree Drawing
Helga Gudmundsdottir, Reykjavik, Iceland, 2009
Diptych: Ink on paper, 40 x 26 cm & C-type print, 40x26 cm

"I first caught his work back in March at VTO's final show. A small piece, which quietly snuck down a corridor in my brain, found a door, slightly ajar, and silently pushed it open, stepped in and waited. And here tonoght the door's thrown open (at Rokeby).
The Best of Knowles's work is based around tying pens to the ends of tree branches and then letting the tips trace an irregular and unpredictable course over a strategically placed sheed of paper. The resultant 'drawings' are then framed and hung next to photographic documentation of the process. A scribbly mess on a page sitting side by side to a photograph of a tree branch resting on a sheet of paper attached to an adapted easel." Russell Herron's Blog Tuesday 27 June 2006

Hugh Mendes
Obituaries: Jack Wild 2006
Oil on Linen 20 x 30 cm

I have been painting images of newspaper clippings for seven years now, covering subjects such as war, terrorism and cloning. The use of newspaper recalls certain trompe l'oile 17th century still life. Recently I have been working on an ongoing series of obituaries. They condense a life into a few column inches and a single image – a scrap of newsprint that becomes a heavy token, a memento, even an icon, when rendered in paint. The act of painting and therefore sustained concentration brings a degree of focus and depth to what would otherwise be fleeting moments in the press.
Hugh Mendes

Mie Mørkeberg U.T. 2009
Indian ink and acrylic on canvas 117 x 88 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Galleri Tom Christoffersen

The landscapes and cities presented in these works are basically pictures of the miniature worlds which we often encounter at the locations they actually represent. It is about the detailed and very controlled scaled down worlds of, for example, the doll house (installed in the house) or the model railway (installed at the main rail way station in most European cities). Toys or representations made to confirm a certain history of civilization: the ideal family and the ideal changes of industrialization.
The artist's play with scale and copy by drawing images of these miniature models of society in close ups puts forth the uncanny. An experience of the unknown suddenly present in what was regarded as known (and safe). In Mie Mørkeberg's investigations into this real-artificial-reality she places the miniatures worlds clean cut representations of the society and the family back into a lived reality and more complex history, where something actually can go wrong.
Mie Mørkeberg

Hadrian Pigott
New York , London , Paris (Stupid Fucking People) 1998 140 Toilet paper rolls and chrome roll holders
200 x 280 x 10 cm

The work is both a celebration and a critique of personal choice and the quest for individuality, quilted, scented and embossed white is the choice in Manhattan , standard white and five pastels for the most part in London , a preponderance of pinks, floral prints and crazy purples in Paris.
Hadrian Pigott

"Went to Jibby Beane's and Hadrian Pigott's soaps. What a strange show."
Russell Herron Journals, 1994

Melanie Stidolph
Kingmaker 2004

Kingmaker' was taken over 2 years of visits to a friend and her family. I wanted to approach taking the pictures in a documentary way, but wanted the end pictures to be able to stand alone, away from the context of the family. I like this image for the joining together of classical, painterly elements – the almost mannerist gesturing of the boy, with the ordinariness of the garden backdrop. And both set against the illuminating/obscuring intensity of the sunlight.
Melanie Stidolph

John Tiney The Arrival 2008
Cellulose and acrylic on board 122 x 183 cm

The Arrival' appeared in a series of work (Travelling Our Way') which originated from a photograph. The photograph was of a sunrise taken while flying to California from London on a trip fuelled by love and excitement. Back in London after the trip I tried to mimic the colour gradation in the photograph and it became the background for a series of small painted sketches. When pushing the paintings larger the colours from the photograph were used much like the roadside advertising seen in the United States and in particular Las Vegas . I wanted to use the colours in forms that attempted to promote the feeling of wonder I had at the start of this particular journey.
John Tiney