Matthew Cox is an Atlanta-based artist who embraces and joins a variety of media to produce several thematic series of work. Medical x-rays and embroidery, couture and crime, rubber stamps, short -story prose and paint all layer toward a darkly comic and anachronistic impression of the human condition in the twenty-first century. Fragmented Hosts, Matthew’s first exhibition in Sweden, will feature both embroidered x-rays and textile-based drawings.
NAME?
Matthew Cox
OCCUPATION?
Artist
WHAT DOES FIBER MEAN TO YOU?
Fiber is tactile virtuosity; a nurturing safeness perhaps. And with embroidery thread also visual color; in full saturation.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FIBER OR TEXTILE TECHNIQUE?
Any stitching that creates a seam holds my eye. Probably because it creates a line and initiates a drawing. I think of my embroidery as drawing with thread.
WHAT IS YOUR MOST VIVID TEXTILE MEMORY?
I recall specific textile memories at different points. You remember Linus with his blanket from Charlie Brown? That was me at four years old standing beside the washer waiting for my blankie to come out. Anxious separation.
My mother was a quilter and that clearly factors into my fiber interest as a child. As an artist, seeing installations of Annette Messager, the great French conceptual artist, hit home. Soft stuffed toy heads pulled over taxidermy. Sweaters knitted for dead sparrows. Embroidered misogyny. She uses sewing and fiber to illuminate tough realities.
FIND OUT MORE
www.matthewcoxartist.com