WALK round Hanover Building of the University of Central Lancashire this week and you could be forgiven for thinking you're in a modern art gallery.

For the classrooms, usually bustling with students, have been transformed into a huge exhibition centre, given over to Arts Week.

Follow the arrows round the building and you'll discover a display equal to anything the Tate has to offer. From the avant-garde to the surreal, and just plain pretentious, it has the lot.

There is even a display by local artist Dave Atherton, whose talent is such that many of the visitors to Monday's launch mistook his work for photographs.

His display entitled Rem(a)inders is based on the theme of loss, and in particular relates to the death of his mother when he was 12.

Dave explained: "I took out-of-focus photos of objects which belonged to my mother.

"Then I painted them, so they are actually paintings of photographs."

Another artist whose work is based on personal experience is Robert Donkor of St Paul's Square.

Robert, who has just completed a foundation course in art and design, says he uses art to explore his early experiences of Extra-Sensory Perception.

"I dreamed I fled to safety down a long country road to my aunt's house, I had never been there," he said: "But the following week, I actually went and it was exactly like my dream."

Robert and Dave's work is on show in the Hanover Building alongside paintings, displays of print making and the ambitious work of under-graduates.

The Victoria Building contains exhibitions of advertising, graphic design, illustration as well as crafts and sculpture and time-based art. While over in the Arts centre in Fylde Road, an exhibition by Industrial Design and Product Design graduates takes place.

Arts Week runs until Saturday June 8 and these exhibitions are open to the public between 10am and 4pm until then.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.