(click image for more details)Only the Good Die Young/Transportion, 2008
21.5cm x 14cm (26cm x 22cm framed)
Martyn Cross presents us with a disturbing and weird world, one where joy and innocence appear infected with dark thoughts and actions. Often using the covers of found knitting patterns as his canvas, brightly coloured images of happiness and comfort are disfigured and despoiled so that their subjects find their newly knitted garments covered in various bodily excretions or the idyllic backdrops they depict become potential scenes of death and violence. When exhibiting, Cross tends to show clusters of individual works together, adding to a growing cavalcade of transgression as he does so.
However, not all is as dark as it first appears. Cross is involved in an examination
of our quest to make sense of our existence and the desire to transcend the mundanity of our everyday lives. His subjects take on an almost mythical persona, inhabiting parallel worlds, ones that do not adhere to the same social order as our own. They are there to act out our most primal and private urges, so we don't have to – or take the consequences – ourselves. Each image functions as a votive offering to appease the 'gods' of our own shadowy inner selves.
Paul Stone, 2008
find out more about this artist
find out more about Paul Stone
