The world's political conflicts and crises are often depicted in the everyday experiences of the artist.

In this way the artist's personal perspective evokes the anxieties and political preoccupations of the time they are living through. Anger and powerlessness in the face of political situations and injustices beyond the control of the ordinary citizen translate into images and stories from the artist's domestic sphere.

These personal reflections on the wider political world can be poignantly beautiful or darkly funny. Sometimes they evoke what is at stake in situations of war and instability with images of home, as in Margaret Tait's Colour Poems. Perhaps the narrative voice-over of the artist replaces that of the politician or newsreader to give a personal version of events. Ian Breakwell's personal narratives offer a satirical view of the inconsistencies and inadequacies of life. In his broadcasts for Channel 4, Public Face, Private Eye and Ian Breakwell's Continuous Diary, he lampoons public figures and revisits some of the personal encounters that shaped his ideas and working practice. Memory and recollection can also play a significant role of filtering the political through the personal. In Home Suite John Smith takes the viewer on an idiosyncratic guided tour of his old home, soon to be destroyed to make way for the M11 motorway, while Breda Beban revisits her birthplace in former Yugoslavia in Too Early for Sorrow Too Late for Happiness, using the landscape, music and encounters of her journey home to document a moment when political and personal histories collide. The animated drawings of Black Magic, in contrast, offer a shocking and hilarious portrait of the world around us.