Work No. 1092 MOTHERS

Work No. 1092 MOTHERS (2011), Martin Creed’s monument to motherhood, is a huge neon sign that spins around at variable speeds so that it seems dangerously out of control. The beam holding the neon lights is twelve and a half metres long, and the letters are two and a half metres high. The work is so large that when it was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery for Creed’s 2014 retrospective What’s the point of it?, it barely fitted into the gallery. As Creed explains, ‘when you’re small, your mother is always really big. So it seemed like a good reason for this to be big and ... scary.’