Photo: Paul Maven with his work Gabriel Hill, 2000. Courtesy Reg Vardy Gallery.

Former students of the University of Sunderland’s School of Art, Design, Media and Culture have returned to their alma mater to show how their work has developed since they graduated.

R+D (Research and Development) is on show at the Reg Vardy Gallery, Sunderland until July 30 and features the work of six artists, including Turner Prize-nominated photographer, Richard Billingham.

Billingham graduated with a BA Fine Arts in 1994 and in the intervening 10 years has become a celebrated and controversial modern artist, exhibiting at Tate Modern and MoMA in New York.

Although he originally only took photography up as an aid to his painting, it was the frank pictures Billingham took of his immediate family that led to his widespread fame.

Published in a book of his photographs, Rays a Laugh, in 1996, the images were then included in the much talked about Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Photo: Hunza Valley, 2001 by Richard Billingham, courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.

His work has subsequently been seen all over the world and in 2001 he was nominated for the Turner Prize. This is the first time his work has been exhibited in the North East since his graduation.

The photographs on display: River, Tree Boles and Hunza Valley (all 2001) are typical of his more recent work and depict deserted landscapes.

His photos are joined by those of Paul Maven, whose contribution to R+D documents a journey he made retracing the steps of his great uncle who, as a prisoner of war, was marched to Poland via France and Belgium.

Since graduating with a BA in Photography, Video and Digital Imaging in 1998, he has won many awards including the Barclays Graduate Award (Photography) and the Northern Arts Photography Award.

Photo: Kathryn Hodgkinson. Courtesy Reg Vardy Gallery.

Another 1998 graduate, Kathryn Hodgkinson, who left with a BA 3D Design in Glass and Ceramics, now runs her own glass studio and is a director of Cobalt Studios Ltd.

On show at the Reg Vardy Gallery are three glass panels - a sample from a large installation that is still in progress and has been commissioned by the Falmouth College of Art.

The commission is comprised of glass panels that will have over 30,000 glass lenses affixed to them in the outline of ferns that are indigenous to southern Britain.

Charlotte Hughes, a Glass, Architectural Glass and Ceramics graduate, has shown her work at the Geffrye Museum, the National Glass Centre, Glaerie-10erhaus Gerunden in Austria and in Claret, France.

Charlotte is showing two works at R+D, one a set of spectacles with Venetian glass lenses and the other an assortment of three large reflective black glass pebbles with trumpet mouthpieces.

Photo: Sonny Williams. Courtesy Reg Vardy Gallery.

Sculptor Dunstan Lowe, who has exhibited throughout Europe and has permanent exhibitions in the USA and the Netherlands, is exhibiting digital images of work created between 2001 and 2003. Entitled Time-Space-Colour, it is a collection of symmetrical works from unusual perspectives.

Sonny Williams graduated with a BA in Fine Art in 2001 and will be displaying three portrait paintings.

According to Sonny, "there is nothing more interesting than people," and he attempts to distil this belief into paint by designing portraits that are both introspective and dramatic.

Sonny has won many awards for his portrait painting, including The Hunting Art Prize (2004 and 2003) and the Barker and Stonehouse Art Prize (2003).