"Martin continues to finesse his method of reduction screen printing, in which he prefers to create his stencils by painting directly onto the screen with screen block or screen painting fluid.
On his frequent wanderings through the great Brockwell Park in South London, he is constantly drawn to the gnarly, truncated tree stumps that punctuate and haunt various aspects of the landscape. The kind of potent, plaintive imagery and symbolism that has inspired artists for centuries.
These once mighty trees have been reduced to melancholic bleached relics; tragic and beautiful, sentinel, muted, vulnerable to the very elements from which they once offered refuge.
They appear in his prints like harbingers of doom, ossified, ghostly apparitions, looming like benign giants or accusatory ogres; while others lay supine, felled, exposed and humiliated, petrified in contorted death throes.
He has chosen to produce these images in monochrome, detached from their natural and literal setting, which further enhances their supernatural qualities. An enigmatic narrative is suggested by placing figures, objects or animals into this void, emphasising the scale and stature of of these shape shifting phantoms."