Martin Creed answers his critics with an additional elementary cut of life

Mike Wade & , : {}

Strange interior this. A set of tables, the largest at the bottom, is built so that the smallest roughly touches the ceiling. Along the mantelpiece a line of terracotta plant pots is organised from smallest to largest. In the sketch room a span of fate is regularly opening and shutting.

This is the universe of the Scottish artist Martin Creed, in his initial square for one person show in the nation that lifted him. For those who come out in a unreasonable at the discuss of the Turner Prize, Creed is there in the pantheon of irritants. After Damien Hirsts cow and calf preserved in formaldehyde Mother and Child, Divided (which won the prize) and Tracey Emins My Bed (which didnt) came Creeds installation, The Lights Going On and Off, that carried off � la mode humanities majority important endowment in 2001.

It was a smart work of minimalism his admirers pronounced that comprised an dull room in the Tate Gallery in that the lights were switched on and off. For that, Creed was presented with a coupon for 20,000.

Here in the upmarket Park Circus district of Glasgow, in the Victorian townhouse of his crony Douglas Gordon, Creed, 41, has been set lax in a finished at home environment for the initial time, stuffing dual storeys with his ever-so-familiar works.

Related LinksMartin Creed"s diary Andrew Dixon selected to run Creative ScotlandMargaret Morris muster reveals colonize who danced to own balance

A smoke-stack of A4 writings piled up nearby the staircase. A wall that has been criss-crossed in red paint, practical with a paint roller. And, on the initial building landing, a customary flare is going on and off again in an vaunt entitled you have probably guessed The Lamp Going On and Off.

One of the things with functions similar to this is that you can report them in disproportion and you can lift them about in your head, he chuckles. I similar to that. Its similar to the approach you can lift around a poem, if you can hold it in your head as an idea.

Critics criticism that any one could come up with this stuff, and Creeds answer is disarming: yes, they could. What sets him detached is stubborn repetition, the same thing constructed again and again until someone takes a great prolonged see at his work a scrunched-up paper round or a pile of Blu-Tack and decides to have a squeeze for, it is said, a five-figure sum.

For a small people this traffic in the art of the stationery sideboard is no shouting matter. But afterwards Creed, for all his self-deprecating humour, can set upon a vicious note about his work.

The word art, he says, as majority as it equates to anything, is about putting things in front of people for their enjoyment. There is no disproportion in between his smoke-stack of tables and a portrayal by David Hockney. It is an agreement of colours and shapes. The actuality that it is finished of tables or paint is a detail. To me, the some-more I think about it, all artists are the same. But I dont even similar to to contend I am an artist, since the word art is so difficult.

Creed, who was innate in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was brought up in Milton of Campsie and Lenzie, a buttoned-up small locale on the northeast border of Glasgow. When he was flourishing up a singular beer hall served Lenzies race of about 8,000, and the idea of opening and shutting a doorway represented a great night out. The internal psychiatric sanatorium forms one of his strongest memories he recalls as a teen running lost and confused patients behind to the sanatorium gates.

He left Scotland to investigate at the Slade School of Fine Art in Central London and, in the following twenty years, usually twice exhibited north of the Border, each time in organisation shows. This year Creed earnings with a vengeance. He has a second square for one person show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and will modify the dark, humid Scotsman Steps close to Waverley Station in to a 100,000 design lined with marble.

In Aug a dance work premiered at Sadlers Wells in London will be reprised at the Traverse entertainment in Edinburgh. To top it all, a pick up of essays, with a key by the artist, will be published by Thames and Hudson and introduced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

It all adds up to the picture of an artist who appears to have been supposed in to a kind of vicious and blurb mainstream. But when he is behind in London, as he creates his approach down to his bureau on Brick Lane, he still wouldnt discuss it cab drivers what he does for a living. I only contend I work in the city, he says. Which I do.

In an office? Yes, in an office. I did have a college of music for dual years but it was a rubbish of space. Most of my work is programmed in in isolation and finished in the world, it is not finished in a college of music and afterwards changed out.

And in an office, of course, he has his palette is to hand: the table lamp, the Blu-Tack, the paperclips. Yes all is there, he says. Masking fasten too.

Gentle, but rebellious wit

As a teen at Lenzie Academy Martin Creed desired art and mostly Glasgow School of Art, where his father taught

At the Slade School of Fine Art he met Douglas Gordon, an additional Glaswegian-born artist. Gordon, dual years Creeds senior, was a rising star in his own right, who went on to win the Turner Prize in 1996. Gordon was obliged for exhibiting Creeds work in Scotland for the initial time, in Outta Here, a 1992 organisation show at the Transmission Gallery

Creeds repute as one of the splendid lights of BritArt grew rapidly. In 1993 he commissioned a 1in brick of masking fasten in the center of each wall at the offices of the London edition organisation Starkmann, a square pronounced to elicit the hemmed-in universe of the 9-to-5 worker

In 1998 he combined one of his majority distinguished works, Half the Air in a Given Space. This consisted of sufficient 12in white balloons to half-fill the gallery. He has finished variants with black, red and varicoloured balloons

Creed won the Turner esteem in 2001, usurpation a coupon for 20,000 from Madonna. Having pronounced that he regarded Turner as only a foolish prize, he pronounced of his installation: It doesnt have it a improved square of work only since it wins a esteem

The Tate Gallery has offering this estimation of his work: Creeds art is characterised by a peaceful but rebellious quick mind and by a minimalism secure in an intrinsic anti-materialism. His mostly intensely self-effacing functions such as Some Blu-Tack Kneaded, Rolled in to a Ball and Depressed opposite a Wall have been characterised as attempts to short-circuit the visually overloaded, choice- jam-packed culture