My Story

Introduction

As I bring together a new edition of my website in 2020 the world is in turmoil.  Increasingly conscious of the fragile bond between humanity and the natural world, I ask myself, yet again, what is my role.  Perhaps we all do, and together we can make the world a better and more beautiful place for everyone by sharing our gifts.

These images are a snapshot of my activity working in metals.  They show the diversity of my interests, sources of inspiration and instances where art, design and our senses can combine to create work.

Churches, institutions, companies, museums, galleries, the public realm and individuals hold examples of my work both in the UK and abroad.  Work can be viewed at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and Contemporary Applied Arts, London.

I thank all clients, curators, individuals, friends and my family who have given me constant support and encouragement over many, many years. 

Photographic credits to:  Andrew Lee, Hugh Beauchamp, Tom Dobbie, Alistair Devine, Enzo di Cosmo, Guido Fua, Chris Goddard, Francesco Marano, Shannon Tofts.

“The meaning of things lies not in things themselves but in our attitude to them”. 

— Antoine de Saint-Excupery

Review

Professor Elizabeth Moignard wrote a comprehensive introduction to my solo exhibition, Exposures, at The Scottish Gallery in 2013. This still expresses my underlying approach and philosophy.

This mixed exhibition of recent relatively small-scale work by John Creed signals the latest move in what he is beginning to think of as a wave-system of advances and occasional partial returns to base at key moments of change for a re-charging and a directional shift, in line with decisive events in his career and his life, and a characteristically practical reaction to them in terms of available time and physical capacity: entering and leaving education, both as a pupil and as an exciting and inspiring teacher; seeing his offspring leave the tertiary education nest; being a grandparent; seeing the quality of hand-forged metalwork in his wife's native Germany at a time when it was deeply unfashionable here; being excited by discovering that silver can be hot-forged in a workshop to which he was taken by a valued mentor; making a working carnyx or Celtic war-trumpet to understand the mechanism of an important archaeological discovery. The life and the work are clearly indissoluble: the house and garden are full of practical pieces - a fine garden gate and a forged door-hinge and latch come to mind. Of course they link with the large commissions which have punctuated his locally and internationally recognised career, but they also operate as a functional everyday part of a working household. 

As a citizen of Glasgow, I don't have to wander very far to see large-scale work by John Creed: just across the park from my office is the re-furbished Kelvingrove Art Gallery, with his screen gates to the ground floor entrance on the side facing the river and the University. They have created a notably different approach to what was once the cavernous storage basement of a Victorian prodigy building, hiding under the steps to the grand portico above. Now their undulating silvery slats draw the eye and the feet towards the treasure house and its exhibition spaces. Their dual role as security and invitation echoes their maker's cross-fertilising sense of his metalsmithing practice. 

The pieces in this exhibition do the same: we are seeing the more recent outcomes of a long career in which the driving interest has been to understand and at the same time to exploit both his materials and his own history and capacities. These objects derive as much from investigation and experiment in his extraordinary and inspiring studio-forge as they do from formally acquired knowledge. There has always been a drive to see whether some of the same practices would work for steel, bronze or silver, and to discover which would not.

An aesthetic and moral hesitation about what constitutes preciousness, which he thinks may derive from his Quaker upbringing, fuses productively with a powerful experimental and empirical ethos to show us some magnificent associations of colours and textures, some hand-made, some the intentionally preserved product of necessary machinery. We are seeing the work of a maker without pre-conceived notions of the techniques which ought to be used to work on a specific metal, who has always been prepared to mix them, stretch and twist them, associate scale with shapes and colour, and give the outcomes a preciousness of their own. They are designed to interact with light: shy mirrors reflect the inner surfaces of their own fragmented screens; a recycled industrial metal plaque with its dribbling gilt wash glows with warmth; the dark shapes of the free-standing sculptures gain definition in naturally lit spaces.

Central to John's current thinking and experiment are the series of smaller-scale sculptures in mixed metals and techniques; we are seeing an emotional response to undulating landscapes and geological phenomena, to hidden natural features and their revelation or exposure by human or natural agency. All these pieces have secrets of form to reveal as we lift or move them, and more to discover about the way they work and test their materials. They display new colours and curves as angle of vision changes; some show dangerous corners and perilously fine turns; one is pierced by a damascened blade in two different colours of steel. Another piece of re-cycled rusted metal seersucker supports a dark smooth angle-edged bowl with a deep dark interior, slightly lightened and textured in sweeping curves by the machine which gave the vessel its meticulously regular gauge. Many of these pieces work by encouraging the metal to reach out curvaceously in more than one direction from a contrasting straight-edged cut. All of them are very clearly their maker's work: they reflect the practices and aesthetic grounded in his experience and long-developed skills, the dedication to his materials and their behaviour, dramatic colours, shapes and surfaces. These are exciting pieces which draw the eye and engage the emotional mind, as they were intended to do. 

Professor Elizabeth Moignard, 2013