Mark Newport, 45, has always worked with textiles, as far back as art school. In the mid-1990s, he started embroidering and sewing beads onto trading cards. Not just ones with sports stars on them, but series featuring military heroes such as Norman Schwarzkopf, along with female strippers and male porn stars. From that exploration of the masculine id, it was a short step to knitting superhero costumes. But first, he had to learn how. Raised by his mother, the artist was first shown how to knit as a young boy by his grandmother but had forgotten through lack of practice. While teaching, Newport relearned the skill with the help of his wife and began showing his students how to incorporate needlework into their art. For the past six or seven years, he has been knitting up a storm, with performances, photographs, videos and comic-book-like prints to supplement his increasingly crafty art. 