Sam Creasey – Mongrel Herald

Andrew Reed Gallery presents Sam Creasey's second solo show, Mongrel Herald, featuring mixed-media works combining carved ceramic reliefs, artist-built frames, and paintings exploring architecture and power. About Andrew Reed Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo show with artist Sam Creasey, entitled Mongrel Herald. The title of the exhibit alludes to a series of new works in mixed media: composites of carved ceramic reliefs, artist-built frames, and woodwork act to overlay figurative paintings, forming narrative tableaux. In a fashion consistent with Creasey's ever-reforming practice, these narratives revolve around architecture, humans' psychogeographic relationships to built environments, and the social reverberations of power. Drawing on images evocative of late-stage capitalism, rapid technological change, privatization, and urban expansion, Creasey's works adeptly evoke the surrealism inherent within these omnipresent forces. A mongrel or hybrid – bringing to mind unnatural composite – is an apparatus for managing contradiction. The contradictions rife in contemporary life feel increasingly difficult to bear: the shifting ideals of nationhood – both worldwide and, more specifically, within Creasey's homeland of the United Kingdom – are keenly observed by the artist and depicted in a stalled, incomplete state. It is the impossible stillness of stunt aircraft as it pauses atop its maneuver before gravity sucks the plane down towards a natural reality. Creasey's work captures these moments of pause before cataclysm: his visual language is what a black hole's event horizon is to an astrophysicist, a singularity to a computational scientist, a market crash to an economist. Hybridization suggests an unwillingness to choose a single path, opting instead for a melding of multiplicity: holding onto the past whilst lurching towards an uncertain future. Hybrid cars compromise electricity with petrol; hybrid learning oscillates between physical social engagement with education filtered by a screen. Hybrid national identities fuse countries' cultural tropes with qualities of other arriving cultures. Creasey observes how contradictory principles exist in the UK and illuminates these indeterminacies in his body of work. Who Do You Think You Are? (2026) and Forward to the Drawing Board (2026) feature traditional English village signs around which seemingly antithetical images orbit. The latter piece nods to the perpetual newness of architectural visualisation imagery, depicting a gleaming development of highrise flats. The pristine structure is an eerie utopia, utterly lacking the idiosyncrasies worn by time, grit, and the footprints of inhabitants. Similarly, Who Do You Think You Are? features a blank village sign yet to be adorned with heraldry. Perhaps a local committee is still adjudicating on what symbols should grace its terracotta surface. Meanwhile, the sign waits like a perpetually loading computer screen. The UK is nothing in an entirety: neither public nor private, socialist nor capitalist, constitutional nor fully codified, free-market nor state-planned. Culturally, too, the country struggles with a national identity deeply rooted in monarchy, tradition, and grandeur, while contending with a contemporary Britain that proclaims inclusivity, cultural diversity, and openness. Often taught histories of enlightenment-era scientific exploration and Victorian infrastructure are now reaching their 'sell by' dates, increasingly apparent in the cracked and leaking infrastructure that underlies Britain's ancient cities. In Oscar (2026) and Drunk on Dividends (2026), Creasey uses these visual tropes to allude to contemporary deliberations on the privatization of public utilities and virulent anger surrounding immigration to the U.K. Lush, irrigated fields backdrop a terracotta relief structure of pumps and pressure valves in Drunk on Dividends, a sly commentary on Britain's growing water crisis. Creasey himself resists categorization: does he admire his homeland or revile it? He is quick to note the hypocrisy of monarchic wealth and overseas shareholders that reap the benefits of the UK's indebted water companies; equally, he draws our attention to England's ancient beauty, apparent in twisting waterways and bucolic countryside. Mongrel Herald suggests that in the midst of digitization and streamlined domestic architecture, there is still space for human softness: a lingering determination to retain distinctly mortal appreciation for that which is flawed and uncertain, as are we all. Read more Toggle Mixed media Painting Sculpture Crafts