JEM Finer may be best known as a founding member of Celtic punk group The Pogues.

But to Jem, who co-wrote the Examiner readers’ favourite Christmas song, Fairytale of New York, playing music is just his ‘day job’.

And that’s because for years Finer has been a leading conceptual artist.

His latest work, Still, will be on show in the chapel at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, from Saturday, February 11.

Finer, who is a skilled computer programmer, has taken about 18,000 images of a Kent wood from the same viewpoint for more than two years.

The images are fed into a computer program, which arranges the images into one of many chronological sequences, for example, from dawn to dusk or from winter to spring.

The results are projected on to a giant screen in the chapel to show the woodland scene in all seasons, at all levels of light and in all its natural colours.

None of the pictures was treated with photo editing software, to keep the images as natural as possible.

Still is the latest conceptual work by Finer, who in 1999 wrote Longplayer, a piece of music with enough computer programmed sequences to enable it to play for 1,000 years!

Finer was born in 1955 in Stoke-on-Trent and studied computer science and sociology at Keele University.

It was the concept of playing Irish folk music with a punk attitude that convinced him to form the Pogues with singer Shane McGowan and tin whistle player Spider Stacy in London in 1982.

Finer, who worked as photographer before he formed the band, says: “The Pogues started from the idea of playing traditional music without being able to play the instruments and adapt a punk attitude to the tradition. That’s what appealed to me.

“I was more interested in the idea than being in a band.

“The day job, if you like, is playing music. If I had to give something up, that’s what I would give up.

“Music is just one of lots of different things. The other guys in the band know this (art) is what I do first and foremost and sometimes I can’t play concerts because that’s what I’m doing.”

While Still shows the transitions between seasons and the times of day, they aren’t the focus of the work.

Finer says: “The obvious things, such as the seasons changing, weren’t as exciting but it’s the subtle changes, for example, in the light, that are the most interesting.

“ I arrived at a new way of making a film.

“In fact, it’s a slow course of photos. I prefer to call it moving pictures. It’s not a film.

“I hope the public get something from it that surprises them. There isn’t any one thing. It’s better when people tell me they’ve had a new experience.

“I hope people stay long enough to realise that it’s not one photograph.”

The multi-instrumentalist Finer plays banjo, hurdy-gurdy, mandola, saxophone, guitar, piano and drums.