A NORTH-EAST museum is holding Britain's first exhibition devoted to the humble loo.

The exhibition, Are You Sitting Comfortably? - the Water Closet Workshop, is to be staged at Newcastle's Hatton Gallery.

About 40 lavatories are on show, some painted in floral designs or making political statements on Aids and nuclear pollution.

Artist-curators Paul Scott and Lillemor Petersson selected a collection of toilet art made during the WC Workshop's residency project held at the premises of a sanitaryware factory in Stockholm, Sweden.

Organisers say the exhibition is "concerned with the creation of art by the change of the familiar into the unexpected; the transformation of the most mundane of ready-made domestic objects into subversions of the decoration - and meaning - of the familiar form".

Exhibits include Maja Sandstrom's Joined Toilet Bowls and Eva Hild's Hollow, which involved cutting circles of clay from a lavatory bowl. Conrad Atkinson's toilet designs are intended as a comment on the HIV virus, consumerism and the exploitation involved in Third World food production.

Paul Scott's loos depict Sellafield as the nuclear toilet of the world and Mary Jo Bole's prison sink, "examines the morality of the penal system and its domestic conditions".

Gallery curator Lucy Whetstone said the exhibition, which runs from Saturday to January 11, would provoke debate.