LAYER, at Cornwall Contemporary, Penzance, could not be better named, as artists Bren Unwin and Ian Brown, pictured, use a layering of imagery while being remarkably adept with technology.

Not only president of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers but, as far as it is known, also the first artist in Cornwall, let alone Penwith, to hold such an eminent position, St Just-based Bren, born in Kent, studied at St Alban's School of Art and Design and the University of Hertfordshire where she was appointed as a visiting Research Associate and received the Chancellor's medal for outstanding doctoral research.

She first came to west Cormwall in the 1960s, has exhibited widely and been acclaimed for work which now forms part of a number of public and private collections. A member of the Penwith and Newlyn Societies of Artists she is also a member of Cape Cornwall Coastwatch team, and it was during a spell of duty that the seeds were sown for the multi-layered prints and oil paintings shown here.

She started to read local author Mike Sagar-Fenton's acclaimed Penlee: The Loss Of A Lifeboat. In 2003 she etched the large plates (Fateful Night, 16 Series) at the Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries.

"At the time I didn't have an acid bath large enough take the 53cm plates. I continued for a year or so, and then tucked them away in my studio for the next eight years.

"The imagery came out of my experience while on watch at Cape Cornwall. It was never my intention to use the plates in relation to the Penlee disaster. However, as chance would have it, eight years later, on the radio I listened to a different tragedy unfolding, the sinking of the MV Swanland in the Irish Sea.

"At the time I was working on a copper plate. The colours of the inks and marks came together in a way that brought to mind the hours I'd spent looking out to sea from Cape Cornwall and, more specifically, to the tragic events detailed in Mike Sagar-Fenton's book.

"I rescued the old plates and reworked them into images associated with the fateful night that resulted in the loss of 16 lives from the lifeboat Solomon Browne and cargo vessel Union Star."

The paintings and prints in her Fateful Night series are as striking and sincere as they are soul-searching and sad.

Acknowledging the debt she owes to Mike Sagar-Fenton, she announced that ten per cent of sales from this series will be donated to the RNLI Penlee lifeboat station. Her colleague Ian Brown who studied at Hornsey College of Art and who, in the same year as Bren Unwin was reading about the Solomon Browne disaster, was exhibiting his photographs at the Cornerhouse Gallery in St Ives.

An associate member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, and currently serving on the committee, Ian has exhibited extensively from the Beardsmore Gallery, London, to the Royal West of England Academy, and is renowned for his skill in manipulating digital photographs, and crafting a layering of images created from multiple exposures.

He said: "These pictures represent my attempts to use photography in the same way I used to work with paint. The figures and landscapes are captured separately and worked together to invent a hybrid space with distinctive photographic and painterly qualities."

His engaging limited edition chromagenic prints on crystal archive paper are not only multi-layered but also must-see works of art.

Admission is free, and Layer by Bren Unwin and Ian Brown can be seen in Cornwall Contemporary, Queen's Square, Penzance, 10am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday, until March 5.