Nicola Murray / Jim Pattison

Created during her residency at Hospitalfield House, Nicola Murray's botanical cyanotype prints are assembled from digital composites of plant imagery, their seeming authenticity belying the fact that each one is a painstakingly crafted work of fiction. Despite Murray's best efforts to feign naturalism, these pictures do have a sense of the mechanical or the alien about them; a feeling heightened by the fact that Murray has chosen to print them with an inverted palette. These images have a quiet beauty about them, and although there is nothing here to get too excited about they do have a certain compulsive quality to them. Created in response to the artist's own experience of kidney dialysis and transplantation, Jim Pattison presents us with sculpture, painting and digital work which engages directly with the mechanics of this medical procedure. The purely digital work is the weakest here; using montage techniques and repetition of biological terms and imagery to create dense sensory stimuli which unfortunately left me cold. The paintings are better however, taking the same subject matter but ending up with an altogether more abstract and personal response. [Lucy Faringold]