Phil Thomas Crockett on Martin McCreadie | Out Through the Head

We commissioned Phil Crockett Thomas in 2024 to respond to Martin McCreadie’s artistic journey and the themes that appear throughout his work. We are excited to share Phil’s text Out Through the Head below.

Martin McCreadie is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Glasgow, working primarily in sculpture, songwriting, and fiction.

Phil Thomas Crockett is a writer and a lecturer in sociology and criminology at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her fiction has appeared in Granta and on BBC Radio 4. She is the editor of Abolition Science Fiction (2022), and of The Moon Spins the Dead Prison (2022) with Thomas Abercromby and Rosie Roberts. Her website is https://crowdedmouth.com/

I first met Martin seven years ago at a Tuesday night dinner in Gallowgate, hosted by the Unbound Community of Vox Liminis, an arts-based charity that works primarily to support people affected by the criminal justice system. Unbound is an evolving community of people who have experienced incarceration, musicians, activists, and academics (people sometimes occupy multiple positions), who meet to make music and art together, to eat, and to hang out. Vox Liminis means ‘voice from the threshold’ and Unbound aims to welcome ‘home’ people who have recently left prison, by nurturing a regular time for creativity and connection amidst the day-to-day challenges of rebuilding a life after punishment. I was there as a researcher on the Distant Voices project (2017-2021) in which Vox was a project partner, and valued Martin’s intelligence and insight as a fellow member of the ‘core group’: people with diverse experiences of the criminal justice system researching people’s experiences of coming home after prison. Initially I knew Martin as a songwriter and writer of fiction, but slowly his beautiful, intricate sculptures started decorating the Vox office. His interest in sculpture then led him to the Glasgow Sculpture Studio (GSS) via an encounter with the artist and curator Thomas Abercromby, and his project the School of Abolition. I visited Martin at GSS in February 2024 to interview him about his recent work. 

Glasgow Sculpture Studio is in The Whisky Bond building on the Clyde and Forth Canal, close to the recently redeveloped Hamiltonhill Claypits nature reserve. We took a walk along the canal and Martin pointed out a swan’s nest, an otter’s den, and ancient graffiti gouged into a stone wall, now blurred by salt, lichen and time. Martin has been coming here since he was a boy, when the canal was semi-derelict. It was a place to run away to, from home and from school, and to find solace in nature. The natural world and its designs and structures are major inspirations for his work. Two of his recent sculptures are inspired by the power and vulnerability of animals: the bison and the silverback gorilla. He explained that the bison ‘represents power, freedom, a wild animal, something that's been persecuted and had made a comeback.’

Looking at these substantial works in the studio, both sculptures seemed as if they could spring to life. The realistic musculature and line of movement in the body demonstrate the artist’s attention to detail. Accuracy is very important to Martin who semi-joked that, “if it worked out like a soft toy, I’d be putting it in a skip automatically!” However, the sculptures also reveal the artist’s playful combination of materials and textures. Light as a Feather, Heavy as Lead (which represents a gorilla) balances leadwork informed by his days working in construction, with a delicate, almost haute couture arrangement of black feathers across the gorilla’s shoulders and head, which give an uncanny suggestion of fur. Bison in Blue Jeans is made of wood, chicken wire, papier mâché, foam, and crucially, denim. Martin explained that this is in reference to the uniform for prisoners in Scotland: prison issue denim jeans and a fleece. Martin spoke movingly about the lyrics of Neil Young’s 1989 protest anthem Rockin’ in the Free World, and the character of the kid ‘that'll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool’ as someone who would end up in jail in the real world. He asked, “do you get a chance to come back out again to wear a pair of jeans and be cool?” How does it feel to choose to put on a pair of jeans if you were once compelled to wear them every day?

Transformation is an important theme in Martin's work, and part of this is seeing the potential in abandoned things, and about recycling them for a new purpose rather than letting them go to waste. Materials for his sculptural works are often found in the GSS workshop scrap bin or on walks in the local area. At one point during our tour of GSS he lost his new monogrammed cap and disappeared to search for it, before returning, waving it in triumph. More profoundly, documents associated with his progression through the criminal justice system – such as indictments, parole applications, and psychological assessments – were shredded alongside the song lyrics and fiction he wrote in prison and turned into the papier mâché used to make his sculptures. I am struck by this gesture – not simply to destroy documents that had a profound effect on his life – but to fragment and repurpose them into something that he has given meaning to. Martin commented that he was initially:

“taking all that literature and transforming it into something else and trying to make sense of where I was at that time… But as this artwork has been continuing, there has to be a step from transformation to a point where you say, well, I'm not transforming anymore. I'm now at a point where I'm saying I'm choosing what I want to be. I went through a transformation process, but that transformation has transformed my psychology, which has transformed my thinking, which has transformed me as a person. Which has transformed my life, relationships, involvements, attitude to life, attitude to myself, the past, the future. But… [I] try to be anchored in the now… Can you say, ‘that happened in the past, but I can't let it define me as a person?’ All that has happened in the past should be a source to further yourself, before you leave.”

To fragment something can enable us to look at it a different way, can reveal that a seemingly solid thing isn’t the only form it can take. Martin’s rejection is not only of the totalising and bureaucratic violence of the criminal justice system as symbolised by these documents, but also of the man he used to be. He spoke openly and articulately about his struggles with trauma, addiction, violence, and mental health. Alongside his study of psychology and psychotherapy (particularly the work of Carl Jung), the arts have had an important role in helping him face these issues and to heal. We spoke about his experimentation with different techniques, forms, and mediums, Martin commenting that it’s not just for experimentation’s sake and that, “there is a sincerity about it in all of this work, in all my writing, it's about life and death. It's about me being alive and staying alive.”

Although Martin has loved art since his schooldays, he initially developed his art and music practice while incarcerated, and his identification as an artist has been hard won. He lacked self-belief due to his lack of formal schooling, and the arts weren’t encouraged for someone with his working-class upbringing, although his childhood home was full of the sounds of music, from Barry White to The Beatles. The name of one of his pieces is Bison in Blue Jeans but he said its real name is Out Through the Head. I could tell from the way he looked at me as he said this that he worried that I might think the true name pretentious. Martin also worried that people might take issue with him as a formerly incarcerated person having the right to call himself an artist. His bison sculpture has homemade barbed wire wrapped around its horns. He commented, 

“I made in the house. Yeah, I mean, I had to wrestle, it was like a boa constrictor! It was all over the house – it was in my back garden, it was grabbing cushions – it's not great to do it in the house! So this represents the idea that society still has its talons and its grip on even an ex-prisoner.”

It also symbolises that freedom is elusive, no-matter how hard you work on your psychology, there is still barbed wire, much of it ‘homemade’. 

His work across different mediums is thematically interconnected, with ideas and imagery resurfacing in different forms. For example, his most recent sculpture Tall Boy (2024) is a guitar, highly detailed, and crafted almost exclusively from the wood that came from the bedroom set of furniture that his parents received as a wedding present. Later he told me about how he first fell in love with the physical form of the guitar and bought one from the Barras market long before he learned to play. He was taken by the idea that “music originally came from struggle. You struggled to express. You struggled, or you wanted to put your struggle in a form.” The guitar is presented alongside bundles of smoked wood, a reference to his novella A Robin’s Song (2024) in which his protagonist Woodruff experiences a spiritual release through ritual of mourning for his grandfather in which his community bring furniture to the wake and build a bonfire. A Robin’s Song is the final part of his trilogy The Journey, which also includes novels The Dream Factory (2024), and Dark Horses (2024), all of which were conceptualised while he was in prison in the days before in-cell entertainment. 

“So, that process of being alone in a prison cell with nothing at all. Then what do you do? … You have nothing to do but work on your mind and work with your mind. And then your mind just becomes this autonomous thing that runs a riot! And you ran from the mind, you ran from your imagination. And then I was reading about prisoners in America who were in solitary confinement in darkness, and they were seeing projections on the wall that their mind was projecting. So even though prison, you're sent there by society and then that's the physical sense. But nobody mentions what's happened in the psychological sense.”

The Dream Factory is a work of science fiction, set in a futuristic New Glasgow Prison in which staff use invasive technologies and psychological torture to punish and transform the prisoners. The protagonist of The Dream Factory turns to writing fiction as an escape from the prison culture, penning Dark Horses, a novel within a novel. As sci-fi author Samuel Delany notes, “science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present… [we] look at what we see around us and we say ‘how can the world be different?’” The Dream Factory was inspired by Martin’s experience of prison psychiatrists and his frustrations with the demand that prisoners change for the better while subjected to the pressures and pains of the prison environment. As a prisoner, he was involved in the prison riots in the 1980s over conditions within the prison estate, which led to prison reform and improvements in conditions, but also a violent retribution on all prisoners. He spoke passionately about prisoners’ lack of rights, and the issue of the Scottish Prison Service and its staff having ‘Crown Immunity’ from prosecution. This issue has been in the public eye in the last few years following deaths in custody, brought to light by the campaigning of the affected families, devastated to have no legal recourse when prisons fail in their duty of care. 

Kirsty Hendry, the Learning and Engagement Manager at GSS, developed a bespoke mentoring scheme to support Martin when he joined, and we spoke about how he had initially struggled with and resisted it. Despite his independence it is clear from the way that the technicians and staff interact with Martin that he is very much a part of the GSS community. I get the sense that Martin needs to do things his own way, even if this is more challenging, to keep expanding his sense of freedom. This is perhaps something that is hard for those of us who haven't experienced such a loss of agency and liberty to understand. 

“So this process of me being at Glasgow sculpture Studios is an opportunity for me to rehabilitate, which means … going back to something I was previously, something like that? What was I previously? … My life has just been violence… and the criminal justice system. And so, who can change that?... I can change the individual, but there has to be part of society [where] there is opportunity and chances for people to take to change themselves, and this [GSS] is an example of that. But it's been a long time to get here. Yeah, a long time.”