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I work from imagination to create my own poetic vision of the world. Over time, I have developed a number of themes and characters, largely with origins in childhood memory and dream imagery. My subject matter reflects my interest in, myth, folklore, history and  magic and my characters express both the light and darker sides of human nature....
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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...
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I am an interdisciplinary maker working predominantly with performance, sculpture, installation and print. Using a variety of props and materials I devise ‘scenes’ to examine my relationship to certain objects, texts and spaces.  Exploring specific locations, libraries and archives I then enact/present my findings playing...
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Having worked on a wide range of permanent Public Art projects, Stephen brings a lively imagination and a singular aesthetic to each commission he is involved in.Each site has demanded very different responses, so that artworks often use different materials and industrial processes.Stephen combines his own artistic concerns with these individual...
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Tender Machines is a new series of work inspired partly by architecture and machinery such as pylons, water towers, agricultural machines like threshers, and water towers. These have been first recorded in a sketch book and then later recalled in the studio and transformed with imagination to create individual characterful 'personages'. Each of...
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In making visual equivalents for the elusive experience of silent watching, I appropriate lines from the outside world in opposition to myself and in this way consider the complex relationship between the external landscape and an inner felt world. I am interested in the interface and enmeshing of different disciplines, science, art,...
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Basically, I stick things together, and make some stuff- which I often assemble into other things. Ive watched a lot of telly, read some books, both text books and novels, seen films, been places. There are many archetypes employed in my works. The work like myself is reactionary, I am very much interested in our experience both mediated and...
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My work addresses themes of absence, memory and female identity and has evolved from an exploration of the empty domestic interior. It explores the borderland between absence and presence and between the familiar and the strange. I use the motifs of wallpaper and women’s clothing to evoke the presence and traces of past or absent inhabitants...
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I use painting, photography and print to explore my interests in systems, architecture, modernism and ruin appreciation.
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For me, painting is a search for looseness, a way in. After that, the real business starts. I try to keep things moving. My process drifts between concept and sleight, intuitive play and rigour. 'That's how art exists in this world of ours – a clear head in the face of calamity.'      Charles Simic 
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Selector text Alice Forward's work explores the uneasy psychological and social relationship between man and nature. It traverses the edges of their respective territories where flora and fauna exists despite mans expanding habitat. The latent potential for nature to reassert itself is explored in several works with an implied menace resonant...
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The artist Yves Klein called the flame ‘a living brush’. I use the sooty carbon trace left from a candle flame to make smoke drawings. To me this ephemeral material expresses the passage of time, memory, absence and our fragile and transient nature. My recent works have taken a look at the sooty material itself, the element of...
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Hancock-Martin uses the exhibition space as a core material in her work. Alterations to a building are observed in changes to the finish of the space. Ceiling surfaces, walls floors and fittings are adjusted or covered to achieve a new texture, pattern and experience of the location. In this working of layers, the artist shows us something...
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'In my photographic work I was always especially entranced by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long' (W.G.Sebald, Austerlitz) Upon...
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At the moment I am developing a new body of work which focuses largely on halftone graphite drawings appropriated from Google Sky images of celestial objects, including stars, constellations and galaxies. I then force these images through my own mediations and interventions, photocopying the originals and reproducing these as meticulous detailed...
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My practice centers on the idea that free will is an illusion.
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My childhood on the Isle of Wight inspired me to work from the elemental landscape and world around me as a very free, direct and natural way of open learning and enquiry - I grew up influenced by the painter David Bomberg and his sense of approaching nature through drawing as a tool to establish a poetry of 'form' as an interconnected reality. ...
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Initially, I had a fascination with line: as both container and content, as a rhythmic weaving of space, trailing a history of impulses and observations.  Three-dimensional configurations, on canvas and paper, led to actual three-dimensional structures. In the beginning I made "chains" or "pathways" from corrugated...
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I have been making constructed forms from willow, fibre and metal using innovative techniques for over 20 years. My work ranges in scale from small domestic pieces to large installations, and recently I have begun using enamel.I collaborated with the architect Nick Childs on the Pavilion Building on the Harbourside in Bristol. Other public...
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Lucy Ward explores the territory shared by mathematical systems of pattern construction, the philosophical work of Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis and in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition by rendering her own everyday activity as surface pattern. The intricate drawings map the occurrence of anticipated and repeated events in regularly ordered 2D space...
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I like that which lies between. Between sculpture, performance and drawing. Between conceptual and process-based. Between the Baroque and kitsch. Between the narrative and the poetic. Between drawing and written language. Between craft and art. Between the poignant and the absurd.Although my work is rooted in sculpture, it revolves around a core...
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My creative practice has changed dramatically over the last few years; a metamorphosis of using traditional methods, such as stitch and enamel, to my latest works that use a more analytical approach via sculptural interpretation, installation, photography, film, collecting and recording data. I am currently interested in using an interplay of...
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I often take as starting points the parks and other green areas in urban environments (real or imagined) as settings for recreating, (reinterpreting) narratives from cultural history. I see my paintings as portrayals of (primal) characters and spaces which evoke social narrative (religion or myth) but are rendered subjective (and...
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Suzanne Mooney: Artist of the monthEach month a guest selector chooses an artist from the Axis directory to be featured as our artist of the month. This month writer and critic David Trigg discusses his selection.Central to the work of Suzanne Mooney is a fascination with the cultural significance of photography and its impact on how we perceive...
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My current work explores the experience of mesmeric moments when gazing at the glittering reflected light on the surface of the sea: images on the brink of dissolving without relinquishing their recognisable origins. THE question of how to render the quality of the experience, to create an emotional charge for the observer –contemplative and...
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