Maritime

Exploring maritime imagery has taken Cox around the coasts of the United Kingdom, under piers and wharf, inside sinking hulks and to China, India, the Philippines and Hong Kong. His maritime images have been widely collected, published and exhibited.

Martin Cox has a long and resonant relationship with maritime subjects. Emerging from the city from which most engineering crew of the SS TITANIC were drawn, meant growing in the shadow of this disaster as four of every five crew members were lost. Family memories claim many a lost Great Uncle, Grandfather. Cox used to play in the tidal zones at Marchwood and watch the great ocean liners sail from Southampton’s Western Docks.

It was the final departure of QUEEN MARY from Southampton that cemented a connection between maritime transport and deeper emotional turmoil, as the citizen’s poured out in hundreds of thousands to weep openly as the great ship sailed from her home port for the last time. A ship that to many had helped win the war, had been a sole connection to the New World, and represented an era of Britain’s achievement at engineering, craftsmanship and seamanship.