Centrespace, Visual Research Centre.

Preview: Thursday 8th June 2006, 6.00pm - 8.00pm
Exhibition: Friday 9th - Friday 30th June 2006

The personal journey experienced by Scottish printmaker Jim Pattison from diagnosis of renal failure to eventually receiving a kidney transplant informs the latest exhibition at University of Dundee’s Visual Research Centre at DCA.

'Translations', which opens to the public on Friday, is informed by the events in Jim’s own life.

In June 1999 he was diagnosed as having renal failure. He subsequently underwent dialysis until he received a kidney transplant in July 2002. As he underwent the processes of diagnosis, dialysis and transplantation, Jim became aware of a need to make a visual sense of his experiences, and the complex medical terminology used to describe his condition.

This recent series of paintings, sculptures and prints continues his investigations using digital technology to manipulate images and information. In this case the source material is gathered from various sources including the internet, his medical records, and photographs and memories of situations and events from his experiences of dialysis and transplantation.

Jim’s work over the past ten years has concentrated on the manipulation of images and information using digital technology, and the re-modelling of virtual digital images into paintings, prints and sculpture. The resulting artworks demonstrate a desire to make virtual images real or tangible.

Jim is a lecturer in the School of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, at the University of Dundee. He has exhibited extensively both within the UK and across the world, from Edinburgh and Glasgow to Cracow and Moscow. His exhibitions include numerous solo and group shows, and his work is held in many private and public collections. Pattison has also contributed to an extensive range of publications, both individually and collectively.

Funded by a grant of £4,990 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Translations was shown at Edinburgh Printmakers early this year. The accompanying publication, including an essay by Euan McArthur, was partly funded by The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

"The series as a whole is not simply about his experience of illness. While some works refer to it directly, in others (such as these) it is sublimated and metamorphosed into an abstract vocabulary of layered and ambiguous space and interplays of shape and colour until, as content, the origin is no way evident." (Euan McArthur, February 2006)

The VRC is open to the public Wednesday to Friday 10.30am - 5.30pm plus Saturday and Sunday 12.30pm - 5.30pm.

Please contact Vicky Hale, Project Co-ordinator at the VRC for more information: 01382 388064 / v.hale@dundee.ac.uk or visit: www.vrc.dundee.ac.uk/Visual_Research_Centre/whats_on.html