About

Always unravelling, Crews' works are a visual mediation on the human desire for order.

Giving visuality to the complexities of life and the wider systems we live in these works offer an alternative visual order uprooting all that has come before.

Starting within his sketchbook, Crews' ideas first find formulation as drawings and prose. It is here that Crews sits amongst his mind allowing his thoughts and reflections to play out before they find their place as visual realisations.

In a flash of geometric shapes and bold colours, fragments of text, materials and memories extend upon Crews' sculptures, drawings and painting-collages. Materials are tirelessly collected and constructed into an ensemble of distinctive and irregularly shaped fragments. Words, gravel, graphite and paint are just some of these materials that Crews plays with to embed each fragment with its own narrative. The act of assembling, with its careful displacement and arrangement of each fragment imbues an intense energy into both the individual fragment and its spirit as a collective.

Crews seeks to construct a distinctive visual language, one that draws on and departs from both his previous works and the art historical canon. The evolution of his works opens up before us as this exhibition traverses his practice from earlier pieces such as Mother of God, 2003 to his most recent painting Torn Hero, 2024. Decades spent ambitiously disentangling the world around him, Crews' works are a visual testament to the contemplation of the primal aspects of life - death, joy, sex and pain – and, by extension, the essence of art itself.

Employing a sequence of 16 four letter words, typically in a column format, words such as Faux, Copy and Play envelop the works as Crews' poetic word-play amalgamates with their textured surfaces. This careful selection of words is combined with the use of found objects such as walking sticks and ceramic cats unearthed in local charity shops, creating a hybridity of material and word that relays discerning reflections on capitalism, over-consumption and the tyranny of advertising. Most recently, Crews has deployed these word patterns in Bannister Cats, 2025. In reading the columns of the four-letter words one's eyes stroke the manufactured bodies of the ceramic cats. Drawing visitors to engage with both its materiality and witty message on existence in the modern world, Bannister Cats are a representative display of the humorous yet pointed messages embedded within Crews' work.

These wider reflections sit in dialogue with autobiographical elements that run throughout, with works such as Now Your Name is Sam, 2023 speaking to Crews' personal experiences with identity, patriotism, death and survival.