This section traces the work from Yeadon's formative years as a teenager in Burnley, Lancashire. From 1963-66 as a pre-diploma student and later at Hornsey College of Art (1966-69), these early drawings reveal an intense scrutiny of natural forms and demonstrate his considerable skill as a draughtsman. He was deeply influenced at that time by the bleak northern landscape with its high horizons and stunted trees. During this period he was preoccupied with the symbolic and metaphorical characteristics of natural forms, reflecting his emerging interest in existential approaches to the human condition and the ways in which human and ideological themes might be expressed through a close observation of nature. The sketchbooks and scrapbooks, reproduced here, mark these developing interests and illustrate Yeadon's early aesthetic and philosophical concerns.

During the late 60s he produced drawings and paintings of disturbing and sexually charged landscapes, (Totem Landscape series), which led to a fascination with Freud, Rorschach imagery, Jungian archetypal forms and mandala symbolism. Later, at the Royal College of Art, he produced large photo-silkscreens and 'diagrams' of images relating to the collective unconscious.

In the late 70s the re-introduction of figurative imagery becomes socially based, capable of representing the ideas of the time. Developing interests in history painting and encouraged by the possibilities of painting, after visiting the Soviet Union in 1975, Cuba in 1979 and in 1981 he had a studio in Prague as the guest of the Czech Artists Fund. Yeadon began to work with allegorical and political forms. These represented his initial attempts to return to painting and to an intervention into the gallery context after his photo-silkscreened banners and his earlier idealistic mandala imagery.