Martin Creed: Yer Maw

"When you’re small, your mother is always really big so it seemed like a good reason for this sign to be big and... scary." Originally conceived as a two-part piece including both 'Mothers' and 'Fathers' for the theatrical arches of a German railway station, Creed’s new kinetic neon sculpture, Work No. 1092 MOTHERS, has been realised within the darkened north gallery of Hauser and Wirth. Perhaps more matriarchal than motherly, MOTHERS seems to strain against the proportions of the room as it spins atop a pivot near two metres high. Gaining momentum until it resembles a frenzied fairground ride it is a dynamic, spirited assertion into the space, not only "scary" but, as ever with Creed’s work, touched with an element of playfulness and levity.

While the spectacle of MOTHERS dominates the show, the south gallery holds a quieter exhibition of paintings characteristic of Creed’s practice. Working both on canvas and directly onto the walls, the images produced are, at least in part, determined by the unremarkable materials from which they are made: five brush strokes applied with each of the five available sizes in a pack of brushes, for example. While his always numbered works suggest a potentially endless quantity of possible actions, arrangements, sizes and variations, Creed is striving to reconcile his practice with the ‘stuff’ of his surroundings and the perpetual choices and options to be found in the everyday.

Creed finds purpose in indecision: "My general feeling is that I don’t know what’s best," he explains. "Works have to be defined; they require drawing a line around something. But I don’t feel able to draw a line, and I wouldn’t want to because I wouldn’t know how to draw it. So I try to find reasons either to not draw the line, or to draw all the different lines. To find a reason why something could be one size or another or be one material or another."

For Creed, these systems are processes that leave him free to produce spontaneously. It is clearly a method that works. Creed produced the near fifty paintings on show in the ten days before the exhibition, describing the process as "much like doing a music session". It is clear why Creed draws the comparison between painting and music. Working with his band Owada, and more recently with dance and movement (Work No. 850, Ballet Work No.1020), these additional activities are seen as interrelating facets of his practice. Perhaps indicative of his increasing involvement with performance, Creed has timed the release of the single THINKING / NOT THINKING with the exhibition. A two minute paean to thinking and perhaps more importantly, not thinking – and our necessary unawareness of committing the act – the song is structured around two chords, one for each condition. The sentiment is echoed in the accompanying video in which Thinking is represented by a small dog, scrabbling to try and keep up with the "big lumbering beast", Not Thinking.

Creed aims to "dodge and weave", avoiding positioning himself or allowing his practice to be neatly categorised: "I don’t want to say what I am because I don’t know what I am." Although he is often given the title ‘conceptual artist’ Creed laughs at references to the term – "maybe I am, I give up" – before offering a typically conflicted answer: "You can’t separate ideas from feelings; ideas are to help cope with feelings. By that process of thought I would call myself an expressionist. But I would call all artists expressionists, I would call all people expressionists."

By his own logic then, all acts in life have the potential to become not just work but an artwork. It is no wonder that, with so many resulting choices, Creed feels unqualified to make resolute decisions. However his stated parameters for making are, of course, simpler and more vital: "In the same way that I don’t think you can separate feelings and ideas, you also can’t separate sight and sound. That’s the reason I want to work on making noises as well as making shapes. I thought, the first thing I do before I even make a painting is move; the painting is a result of these movements so I tried to focus on the movement and forget about the painting, which led to the running piece which led to the ballet…

"I want to move better. I want to make better noises."