Tom Martin United Kingdom, b. 1986

Tom Martin was born in 1986 in Wakefield, United Kingdom. He is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily across painting and sculpture.
The paintings that Martin makes are derived from a layering and build up of raw photographic imagery, ideas and drawing giving rise to a composite picture of life on the canvas. The imagery is rooted within contemporary still life and figuration but also references imagery of the past. Time is a constant theme that runs through the work, one which Martin has explored for the past decade. His work is a way of attempting to make sense of our world, our place in it and what it means to be human.
Floral arrangements play a central role in the paintings. Flowers are something which Martin has explored for about ten years now. Aside from their seductive nature, they are loaded with such a broad spectrum of meaning and interpretation. When using them in a composition, it is important not to think of them as flowers at all, they are like metaphors, even self portraits. Perhaps more than anywhere else, Martins fascination with time and the cosmos become apparent when looking at his sculptures of shattering vases.
Source material used in the work comes from a variety of places in addition to photography. Drawing, 3D modelling software, imagery from online and appropriated historical imagery are all amalgamated resulting in something that embodies the past and the future but is distinctly of our time. It is a selective layering of juxtaposed ideas and imagery which ultimately leads to something new. Often when using these pieces of source material there will be parts that offer no significant information at all and so they become blank spaces on the canvas, to such an extent that no paint is physically put down on the linen like a memory removed. Working in this way promotes a fascinating painterly dialogue and allows for an element of surprise and uncertainty. As a painting progresses it becomes about embracing what cannot be changed, and giving meaning to new shape and forms which begin to emerge.
Throughout the making of any painting there are constant questions about its possibilities. Our visual experience of the world today is one of both the physical, the visual and the digital. Only when we disregard any preconceived rules or notions about our experiences of this world is it possible to feel free enough to make something exciting. There are no rules, and it’s important to remind ourselves of that. Martin makes paintings that are of a possible world, caught somewhere between digitisation, observation and pure fantasy.