'My work is simple and sophisticated at the same time..My picture of our society is that the things that unite us, at a very simple level, are the ordinary things we make to survive.'
Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin has been invited by DLR to create a major work for the new station at Woolwich Arsenal. This flagship new-build project, designed by Weston Williamson Architects, presents an exciting opportunity for an artist's commission to be integrated within the fabric of the building.

Internationally renowned artist Michael Craig-Martin is well known for large-scale public commissions. Londoners will be familiar with his artworks at Regent's Place and at the Laban Centre, a collaboration with architects Herzog & de Meuron. Visitors to the new Woolwich Arsenal Station now have the opportunity to experience a major new commission, developed in response to the function and architecture of the station. His work has been concerned with fundamental questions about the nature of art, about representation, authorship, and the role of the viewer, explored primarily through commonplace objects both real and as images.

Craig-Martin responded to the site and the architect's designs by conceiving an image that is part of the building. Integrated within the ceramic tiling of the station entrance at Green's End, the artwork depicts a series of everyday objects against a background of vibrant colour. It encircles the entrance walls, welcoming daily users and visitors alike and inviting us to recognize a shared language of objects.

Michael is fascinated with commonplace inanimate objects - from mobile phones to a bunch of keys, chair or a simple glass. "In the contemporary world those things have become ordinary things," Craig-Martin explains. "They are so ubiquitous, so ordinary that you can't really describe the modern world without those objects."

Everyday objects - a watch, a can, a shoe - are drawn against a background of flat, intense colour, with no level of priority. As he explains, "I like the idea of a democracy among the objects." Colour is used to distinguish one object from another, or to delineate one part of an object from another. Craig-Martin has always been concerned with making sense of the world, and interpreting objects and the spaces they inhabit.

Craig-Martin explores the dialogue art opens between representation and reality and between artist and viewer. The set of everyday objects appearing regularly in his works are flattened and simplified, functioning as words do in language. The selection of these objects, their color, spatial relationships and juxtaposition provide the work's tension and narrative. Giving us his set of everyday objects as pictograms Craig-Martin describes the modern world we share.

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