As a continuation of the artist's ongoing fascination with this part of the world, the image, 'Yamal', depicts a stretch of the most Northerly railtrack in the world – the Talnah-Norilsk-Dudinka railway, photographed in the harshest of winter conditions. It leads to the city of Norlisk on the cusp of the Artic circle. Originally a gulag, Norilsk is now predominantly an industrial city that mines large amounts of valuable ores in particular nickel. The tracks recede into the distance but the snow and wind soften its linearity, blurring the image so that it looks like a piece of found archival material.

Born in 1971, Darren Almond participated in the controversial exhibition "Sensation," which first took the revolutionary Young British Artists movement to the mainstream. Since then he has participated in the Venice Biennale in 2003, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005, and his work continues to be greatly anticipated both in Britain and around the world.

Almond makes art in a variety of forms, including photography, video and three-dimensions, always with powerful underlying themes such as journey, travel, space and time, illusion, memory. Almond says as a child he liked to travel by train away from the north England town of Wigan where he was born and raised. He says he had a strong desire to escape the closed, small-town environment and witness for himself the world outside. This element of his own character no doubt contributes to the unique senses of space and time that exist in his work.