“I was perhaps eleven or twelve years old, on my way home from school, playing by some overgrown scrubland, some nondescript and functionless strip of green between the path and the metal fence at the edge of the park. It was sunny, or perhaps it had been raining – at least the weather was good enough that afternoon for me to take my time getting home. I remember finding a faded porn mag or some part of it, a strangely amorphous object in my unreliable memory, printed on a kind of cheap, dull paper you just wouldn't find in porn mags now, with all the gloss and colour and high-res detail. Or maybe it was just that the magazine had been so trashed by all the rain and sunlight and dirt of however many days, weeks or whatever. All rain-sodden and sun-bleached, crumpled and discarded in the stashed undergrowth. But the image – all kind of blue-tinged and faded as I remember – is what sticks in my mind. Or should I say the essence of it sticks in my mind. I can't remember exactly what I saw except that it was the view of a body, or some cropped, truncated part of the body and that a shock registered as a kind of vague, nascent awareness that a whole category of images, or a type of image, existed which I had never seen or fully imagined.”

Alex Schady's ongoing work Long and Short Stitch is a collection of magazine images, that have been interfered or added to. Culled from gay pornographic magazines, the images have carefully stiched over with embroidery thread - an act that is both obsessively prudish and darkly aggressive. The fabric of the paper has been pierced as the thread conceals some of the image below. Schady exihibited at Five Years in 1999 with the solo exhibition Corporate Actions and this year in the group shows Dark Pop and Sleight of Hand, which he also co-curated.

Edward Dorrian works with loops of found video footage. His work Prick for example, uses footage from a soft porn video obtained from his local newsagent. The work, which can be manipulated, acts also as a lure, wrapping the viewer in idle fascination. We observe a woman switch from a person who speaks to the camera, to an object of the detached gaze as she slips somewhat awkwardly into the appropiate poses, coaxed by two cameramen. By our reaction - clicking with a mouse on whichever part of the image we choose - we become complicit in encouraging this transformation. (Susan Morris, catalogue introduction On Boredom)

In Marc Hulson's work the historical line of Romantic painting - beginning at the end of the 18th century and continueing at the beginning of the 21st, considerably frayed - crosses a notional, horizontal line connecting painting, literature, photography, comic strip art, horror films and video recordings. If Marc's landscapes are reminiscent of illustrations to Poe's outdoor stories - they also have something to say about abstraction. And if his encounters with aliens occur not as in Close Encounters, but in tenement blocks and woodland bunkers - this is the fruit not only of a gothic cast of mind, but also of an urban awareness of narrative technique and the importance of photography in contemporary culture. (David Lillington, catalogue introduction Welcome to the secret lands and the secret worlds)

In Esther Planas' work her own image is used repeatedly as a manipulable figure; reflected through the mirrors of photography and video, or translated into the hieroglyphs of graffity. Around this motif she constructs a labrynthine, fragmentary narrative. Cryptic stories, shreds and traces of a constantly elaborating text, thread the images together. Words are gently scrawled accross her pictures or spoken softly over the insistent pulse of the music, she produces with her band Dirty Snow. Her periodic publication Dark Star fanzine extends all the elements of her practice, being a zeroxed, diaristic collection of material that inspires her. Various disparate elements are woven together by her drawings, collages and handwritten texts.

In terms of their close-ranged focus and minute detail Sarah Woodfine's drawings demand from the viewer the kind of intimate inspection more usually devoted to pictures in books. Her images also relate to illustration in a more psychologicalkly complex ways. It is not uncommon during childhood, to encounter illustrations which arouse an inexplicably powerful sense of the sinister. This quality is not by any means restricted to images of overtly disturbing subjects. Some pictures of the most innocuous content strike children as frightning, almost as if they were stylistically malign. Woodfine's new drawings take as their starting point an old illustrated ctalogue of children's toys. In the process of being drawn, the toys have undergone a series of amandments and transformations.