Axisweb at The Manchester Contemporary 2012

In 2010 they created "Himptology", an exhibition that explored ideas of belief and belonging through an invented religion based on creativity rather than creation. The project involved a blue grass choir, a host of interesting people talking about their work and a series of "Sunday Service" experiences in which 1980s classics were performed on a ukulele. 

Martyn Cross presents us with a disturbing world, in which joy and innocence appear to have been infected with dark thoughts, actions and events. He often uses the covers of found knitting patterns as his canvas, disfiguring these brightly coloured images of happiness and comfort so that their subjects find their newly knitted garments covered in various bodily excretions, or idyllic backdrops become scenes of potential death and violence. 

His use of found frames sourced from charity shops and house clearance outlets reflects his fascination with the kind of art that merges seamlessly with suburban settings. Cross tends to show clusters of individual works together, adding to a growing cavalcade of transgression as he does so. The new miniature fridge magnet pieces are a natural continuation of the artist's interest in the ways in which art becomes domesticated. 
 

Robert Dawson is interested in the historical development of surface decoration on china tableware or ceramic tiling, as well as the accidental and incidental effects of grout lines between ceramic tiles or the crazing of a glazed surface. He draws inspiration from observing how ceramic objects have been made and put together, the ideas of the people who decorated them, the devices used by craft workers and in industry, and the taste of the buying public. "I feel that I can use this stuff to make new designs," he says. 

Spin, turn, revolution, throw, rotate, orbit, jigger, jolley, around and around.

And around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around.

Spin, wheel, whirl, twirl, gyrate, circle, cycle, Campbell, twist, swivel, pirouette, pivot, thirty-three and a third, PhD, ‘til the moon went down.

Inguna Gremzde's miniature paintings, executed on plastic bottle caps, examine our relationship with the natural world. She argues that urban, consumerist lifestyles have alienated us from nature and limited our capacity to identify with landscape.

Historically, miniatures are tiny worlds on their own. "The cleverer one is at miniaturising the world," Gremzde says, "the better it can be possessed." She finds  parallels in the act of painting in miniature and our desire for material ownership and consumption. She also sees these works as a reference to the shrinking space of untouched nature. Once miniature paintings were treasures; now these small landscapes speak of the necessity for human beings to treasure their natural environment again.