Like a botanist in the field, the artist is always about the business of gathering samples, implications of the creative process encoded within the universal landscape which will point the way to a larger comprehension. In order to do this he selects different tools for different jobs, specific mediums for specific points of view. For example, several years ago he showed me a series of photographic studies taken along the rock craggs of Ireland's southern coast. I thought at first that the images were satellite photographs - they seemed to be taken from above. But they were in fact small details, sample micro-cosmic worlds taken at various points in the rock faces.

This sense that one is glimpsing the vast and the finite at one and the same time is one of the many perceptual shifts common in Dempster's motifs. Such shifts give the viewer a new role, that of a participant in both space and time, a grainy specimen that can appear to be a surface but which is in fact a depth of understanding. Within this unit, isolated and defined in the format of a photographic image, lie the implications of everything immortal, the big issues of existence.