A group project exploring the role of influence in the creative process that strays into medieval thought, occultism, bibliomania, renaissance thought, art, medicine, science, superstition, dance music, and horror movies. Adventures into the realms of Influence and Inspiration. The participants seek to indulge as many superstitions and pretensions about the subject through their working practice in an attempt to exploit the pervading myth of the Artist, encountering long forgotten notions and contemporary attitudes to the subject.

The exhibition picks up on contrasting, yet equally questionable, ideas about what influences the artist, and tries to distil substance from familiar and not so familiar ideas that range from not eating still-water fish (a cause of melancholy) to the kitsch-as-Romantic (irony legitimates any practise).

Note: this exhibition does not attempt to discriminate or ridicule any notions in particular as they are all equally fair game.

Marianna Austin's recent work has been concerned with the development of forms and shapes into an abstract architectural space that has no concrete location. In so doing, the action takes place on what might be a microcosmic or macrocosmic scale, thus playing with Renaissance conceptions of perspective (that attempt to situate a definite position for a viewer in the world) and chaotic fractals (that suggest the essential disharmony of the universe, but which conceals a definite order of things.)

Also, within the architecture of the paintings I have tried to represent the flow of abstract energies that constantly move about and produce new forms, almost as if the energies have solidified and found a permanent form.

David Bracegirdle is interested in misinformation, the means by which the transmission of information provides its credibility.

He is a member of Clear As Mud with ETP Hathaway and Daniel O'Reilly ... or is he?

ETP Hathaway uses video to convey neurotic despairs and triumphs, a constant self-referential argument where there is no winner.

Ed constructs the sexual mores of hopeless / unusual / schizo characters and scenarios, often relating to artist / author / auteur issues.

Martin Randal Rebhorn is associated with Clear As Mud and works with painted images that conflict the abstract with the representational. Often the forms become so fetishised that they become abstract anway, using organic machinery as the conduit of unusual fluids and energies that could be associated with medieval theories of human biology.

Nathan Witt. Desire and will — and an erratic host. This is the start, whether I like it or not, and any progression seems to take an eternity; that is if any progression actually happens at all. Whatever happens is always in doubt, is always changing, and always in flux.

And I don't mean that in the same way as the old cliched artist waiting for their precious transgression through their precious materials and their even more precious vision. What actually happens literally changes, the work won't-and-cannot sit still; the work will not co-operate. Starting, after considering for a long period how much you demand and expect, is an effort and it seems that is exactly what the work is. An effort.