I started numbering my works because I wasn't happy with titles made of words. They meant too much and added too much extra, and I wanted a way of treating everything the same, big or small, whatever it was made of, whatever it was. Using numbers - just like catalogue numbers - seemed a good way of doing this. All numbers are equal.
When I started numbering my works I went back and gave numbers to old ones. I got quite self-conscious about it - about which numbers I gave to which works - and found that I didn't want to have a 'Work No. 1'. It was too much. I couldn't live with it. WORK NO. 1, MY FIRST WORK! NO WAY! The point of the numbering was to try to give all works the same value - to treat everything the same - but the number one just was not the same. Not all numbers are equal.
And so I tried to make a kind of fade-in. I started with 3, put 5 next, and went on up from there.
Martin Creed, 2005