Nimki works from the landscape, using plants as the main inspiration. In the past three years he has concentrated on drawing weeds and discarded flowers that he finds in the urban environment, discovering beauty in the overlooked and the unconsidered. Each work is a record of a given area in a particular time, a carefully constructed record of what is regarded as worthless and insignificant.

These works can be read as the narrative of colonisation and the unwanted plants as the 'alien'. These large drawings poigniantly discover a beauty in the overlooked and unconsidered
Jacques Nimki is represented by The Approach, London , where he recently had a solo exhibition.

Joan Key showed in 'British Art Show 5', (2000); 'Vivid; painting from London and New York ' (2001); 'Words for Harp; text work for Music' (2001); ' SLG Live Art 4' (2002). She is represented by Richard Salmon Gallery, London.

The dominance of photography and new media at the end of the Twentieth century has stimulated a renewal of interest in painterly mimicry. Mimicry also exists in the natural world where its primary function is to conceal, camouflage or deceive predators, ensuring the survival of the species. His paintings have an attention to detail which suggests that their purpose is to reveal all, to embody a whole view of the world, and yet they conceal as much under their immaculately executed surface...

Mark Fairnington held the Sargant Fellowship at The British School at Rome in 1999. Recent exhibitions include: Ace Gallery, Los Angeles (2000), 'Peep Show', Mobile Home (2000), 'The Wreck of Hope', The Nunnery Gallery, London (2000), 'Saatchi in Sheffield', Mappin (1999), Gallerie Axel Thieme, Germany (1998 & 1999).

She has shown internationally; recent projects included a solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2000, and in the Skulptur-Biennale Munsterland in 2001. She took part in the Yokohama Triennale in 2001, showing a work made while Henry Moore Fellow at Spike Island in Bristol.
She discussed a chronology of works, starting with her hybrid memory maps of 1993 for which she asked people to draw a world map from memory, using the drawings for paintings titled after those who drew them and thus performing a transition from the mind to the page.

Her later tank works are linked to paintings as much as they are connected to the science of optics. She addressed the response of the viewer, who is caught between an imaginative circumnavigation and a physical impasse, and suggested that the 'perfect illusion' of her works always fails, due to the experience of the physicality of the body.

The illusion is dismantled or destroyed, undone by the presence of the viewer who seeks to find him/herself in the surface of the image. While the works suggest a human presence, it is one that is figured as an absence, producing a subject at the same time as its object, and challenging any accurate representation.

Tom Hunter

Tom Hunter is well-known for his photographs depicting travellers and squatters, carefully composed to recreate paintings by Vermeer and the Pre-Raphaelites.

These have been included in numerous group exhibitions in Britain, Germany, America and Canada. Solo exhibitions include Thoughts of Life and Death, Manchester City Art Gallery; Green on Red Gallery, Dublin; White Cube, London; and a retrospective at Photofusion Gallery, London (1997), the year that he graduated from the Royal College of Art and won the John Kobal Photographic Prize.

Hunter described how his engagement with political work arose out of an acute awareness of the way in which one's dwelling affects subjectivity. He brings a genuine knowledge and understanding of his subject matter to his work, a knowledge that has been acquired through having lived with travellers and squatters, as part of these communities.

His work is motivated by the media's misrepresentation of these marginalized groups. Hunter maintains that images can change events. His intention is to depict these lifestyles for posterity, to humanise his subject by imbuing the image with importance and warmth, demanding an empathetic response from the viewer. The relationship with his subjects is consensual, blurring the line between his life and work.

He recounted the story behind the making of each of his images, the narrative of the subject, and how this engages with the narratives of the paintings on which the photographs are based. An unconscious evaluation of such iconic images as the paintings by Vermeer and the Pre-Raphaelites merges with the viewer's reading of Hunter's photographs of the same composition.
As in his photographs, these paintings are a chronicle of their time, conveying the social and political situations that their subjects encounter. As in Tracey Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, a novel that is created around one of Vermeer's paintings, Hunter's intention is that the viewer constructs a narrative around his photographs.

Hunter is represented by White Cube, London.

Zineb Sedira


Zineb Sedira makes video installations. Much of her practice is engaged with issues of memory and identity, and she often takes the personal as a starting point for her work.
Click image to enlarge

The veil, whether mental or physical, is a consistent theme in her work which challenges explores and interrogates Western stereotypes about Muslim women and Islam.

Sedira exhibited at the 49th Venice Biennale and also participated in Biennales in Valencia and Limerick. She has co-curated and is exhibiting in 'Veil', a major touring exhibition organised by inIVA and the New AA Gallery, Walsall.
Sedira is represented by The Agency, London.