Anthony McIntosh has worked in psychiatry and nursing for more than 20 years.

Alongside this, he has maintained his art practice, graduating from Brighton University last year having produced some of the most evocative work in the graduate show.

McIntosh creates his work with canvas, steel that he rusts in his garden, photographs, items of clothing and shoes, amongst other materials.

He builds these elements up in layers, alluding to the layers of memory. The rusted steel is a reference to the passing of time, ageing, erosion and transformation. It also connects to McIntosh's own background.

"I first chose rusting steel as a support for the resonance it has with my own childhood memories from the pit villages and cotton towns in Lancashire," he said.

"Most of my family were miners and the rusting artefacts of their labours can still be readily found on the wastelands that once supported thriving communities."

Currently a visiting lecturer at Hastings College of Art and Technology, his experience of working with psychology and those suffering from illness has also greatly influenced his art.

Talking with patients about their past and helping those suffering from Alzheimer's have all left their mark. The theme of memory has been a constant thread. What fascinates McIntosh is the way memories are so changeable.

He said: "Memory is neither pure nor innocent. We can choose to remember or to forget, to reveal or to hide, to bury or exhume."

Sometimes he uses photographs of his family from the early 20th Century with old newspaper imagery he knows nothing about.

He wants to trigger memories in the viewer and allow them to impart their own thoughts and backgrounds.

Interestingly, one photograph he incorporated of a young boy, taken from a Fifties newspaper, provoked great interest among viewers and several people were convinced they had known him.

The works have a poetic quality; it is as though they give a mere glimpse of a story about a particular person or family.

The faded photographs, the worn-out shoes, the jacket that hangs on a coat hook, these were all a part of someone's life at some point.

McIntosh draws these things together in work that has an archaeological feel and a powerful impact.

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