Martin Creed’s Sketchy plan to mix and match

WITH the guessing game in full swing for the Turner Prize announcement in Gateshead next Monday – will Scotland’s Karla Black keep the momentum of her Venice Biennale show, could painter George Shaw prove the dark horse? – former winner Martin Creed has a new commission on the menu.

Glasgow artist Creed won the Turner in 2001 for Work No 227: the lights going on and off. Last year, he was up to Work No 1059, in which he resurfaced The Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh with 104 different marble slabs for the 2011 Edinburgh Art Festival.

Now with Work No 1347 he is transforming the Gallery restaurant at Sketch – an arty London eaterie co-founded by three-Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire. The project includes marbling the floor and transforming the ceiling into an artistic patchwork of soundproofing materials, for a restaurant-cum-artwork in which every single piece of cutlery, glass, chair and table will be different.

Turner-wise Creed says he really likes the work of the other Scottish contender, Martin Boyce, but doesn’t know the other artists so well (video installation artist Hilary Lloyd is the fourth).

He says: “I think the Turner helped me a lot, it helped give people confidence in my work, and it gave me confidence as well. Because I had won this prize, I had a bit of freedom and confidence to try new things.”

Creed’s taste in food seems to swing between extremes – the culinary equivalent, perhaps, of lights going on and off.

He says: “I really like vegan food, but I’m not a vegan, I also really like steak. Either a steak, in a Milan restaurant, or some kind of vegan meal in a weird LA restaurant.” He says he hasn’t eaten at Sketch, even though it’s frequently hosted arty events. “I like eating food, but I’ve got a funny phobia about food, so I wash my hands repeatedly after eating. I feel kind of contaminated by food, it’s a personal phobia. So restaurants which are comfortable and functional, I like them.”

Creed’s work evolves – the Scotsman Steps followed a marble work in New York. The Sketch project “is approximately the same amount of marble, it’s a very similar idea and it’s a flat floor, and I’m doing a zig-zag design, so instead of steps of marble, there are stripes, but the stripes are actually zig-zags so it’s like a herringbone pattern, or parquet.”

The project is meant to mix art and functionality, and Creed likes the idea of people walking over his work. If the furniture promises to be wildly unpredictable, it’s the ceiling that’s intriguing.

“The idea is to try and get all the different types of sound-proofing, and there will be squares of all the different kinds, and the ceiling will be made of that.

“I often think in restaurants that they are too noisy, so when they are packed full of people you can’t even hear the people on your own table.”

A show of arms

A FINE and rare Scottish backsword – a sword with a blade on one edge – goes under the hammer, so to speak, in London on 7 December.

Estimated to fetch £30-40,000 in the sale at Thomas Del Mar – the auctioneer run by Sotheby’s former head of arms and armour – it has a silver basket hilt and is thought to have been made by Walter Allan of Stirling in the mid 18th century.

More of a bargain are 15 pikes that belonged to the Strathspey Fencibles, one of the regiments raised within the United Kingdom for defence against the threat of invasion during the American and French revolutionary wars of the late 18th Century.

Raised from Clan Grant, the Fencibles were notable for mutinying twice in their six years of existence from 1793 to 1799.