CAST your mind back to last August when a painting by Keiran Plows was picked out for the most prominent position – by the big front window – in the Summer Open exhibition at Bar Lane Studios in York.

It was the one with the mule heads in a domestic scene and it whetted the appetite of the studios’ project manager, Ben Clowes.

“After that show, we found out that Keiran had won the British Airways Student Travel Prize in 2007 but after a struggle had moved to York at a desk job,” recalls Ben.

“To help develop his talent and career in the creative industries, we gave him a subsidised studio space and a discount on to the Creative Industries Development Agency mentoring programme.”

During this time Keiran has created a new body of work that will be shown in the main gallery from today until May 28.

That stand-out painting from last year, Laredo’s Missing Citizens Number 10 (Birthday Cake), will not be shown but eight more works from the on-going series will be.

“It’s a series I’ve been working on since 2007, from the last three months of my Fine Art painting degree at Manchester Metropolitan University,” says 25-year-old Kieran. “I exhibited three from the series, which won two prizes at my degree show, so I got recognition from that and then I was the only painter selected for the Urbis Gallery, which put on a show called Catapult 07 with the best of the graduate art from Manchester’s universities.”

He produced four series of Laredo paintings in that initial burst, and the work was such a radical departure for the Blackpool-raised artist that he has taken time to “come to terms with it and develop it, rather than worrying about making money from it”.

“Being a pragmatist first and foremost, I know no-one owes you a living as an artist,” he says.

Keiran’s girlfriend comes from York and he moved to this side of Pennines a year ago, taking up an admin job but also reviving his Laredo series. “I hadn’t exhibited for a while and had only been living in York for two months when I entered the Summer Open exhibition as an attempt to ingratiate myself into the York art scene, and it was Bar Lane’s choice to give it such a prominent position,” he says.

On show in the new show will be two works from 2009, one from 2010 and the remainder from this year, painted at night or at the weekend, with the latest only completed on Monday this week. “At the moment it’s seven days a week, in my spare time, and sometimes it gets to the point when it’s obsessive and it has to be all the time, so it can be demanding,” says Kieran.

The paintings of Laredo’s Missing Citizens were inspired by an article written in 2005 by two journalists from a subversive online news site called Narco News, concerning newspaper coverage of American citizens being kidnapped by Mexican drug smugglers.

“My series of paintings crudely distorts one of the most clichéd cultural symbols of Mexico – the piñata. The paintings depict an inert world populated by voiceless and inanimate characters represented as ‘human piñatas'’,” says Keiran.

“These characters represent both the families of Laredo’s missing citizens and the undermining of Mexico’s image in the U.S. newspaper articles. The ‘human piñatas’ act out the role of a passive victim while contemplating the possible explanations for the disappearances of their loved ones. They are quietly disturbed by a sense of loss that will not allow them to escape the performance of an endless cycle of mundane, everyday tasks.”

Influenced by the artwork of David Hockney (especially his Californian swimming pools), Alex Katz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Lynch’s films and David Bowie’s Low album, Keiran sees some of his work as political, maybe social, but ambiguous. “I don’t like to preach to people,” he says. “Some work is autobiographical, but I use a lot of techniques to distance myself from the works, such as using film imagery from The Hunter and The Graduate. It’s that idea of not knowing what to do with your future with hours and hours on your hand, but I’ve turned it on its head in the Laredo series to make it menacing, and of course when you’re suffering after a person goes missing that only heightens the feeling.”

What draws him to Low, the album Bowie made on Berlin in 1977 while in a fractured mental state? “Within one song he would be extremely sincere then extremely insincere and it’s hard to pin him down. That’s been influential on me,” says Keiran.

“In terms of my own agenda, I very knowingly contradict myself several times in one painting because a story is never black and white and clear-cut. There are multiple viewpoints and we don’t always give attention to all of them, so I’m not coming to a conclusion with this series but presenting different stories, and maybe that’s what distinguishes this from journalists’ work.”