The first time I ever saw Mike Nelson, in 2005, he emerged – bearded, scruffy, affable, resembling a jobbing builder rather than most people’s idea of an artist – from a warren of a building beside a former morgue in Margate, Kent. He was transforming a burnt-out cannabis farm into a vast and eerie re-creation of a functioning cannabis farm (except with non-narcotic plants), and he was stressed by how impossible the task was. Nearly 20 years on he is bearded, scruffy, affable and still stressed by the impossibility of the task ahead: this time, a grand survey of his work to date, for the Hayward Gallery in London. “I’m excited to be doing it but I’ve been dreading it as well,” he says.
It is hardly surprising, given the ambition of his works. One of his most famous, The Coral Reef, which he made at the end of 1999 at Matt’s Gallery in London and again a decade later at Tate, consisted of a maze of 15 extraordinarily detailed and atmospheric rooms – among them a security surveillance office, a drug users’ den, and a mechanic’s workshop. When Nelson represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, he took the roof off the genteel 19th-century national pavilion and rebuilt it into an Istanbul caravanserai. In 2018, in Parma, he filled a huge Mussolini-era building – the Palazzo dell’Agricoltore, or the House of the Farmer – with the detritus of an acre of scrubland cleared for farming – “piles of branches that were almost like twisted bowels and limbs, that were almost anthropomorphic, set in this rationalist architecture,” as he puts it.
How do you present a gallery survey of works of this scale, of this intensity of atmosphere? Particularly when you are obsessed by every last element, as Nelson is. “The aspect which I’m really worried about is the attention to detail,” he tells me. “I might be driven by ideas but I am also driven by stuff: by making, and the pleasure that gives me. It’s not like I send a load of people out with photocopies to go and find objects to build that space. I’m there doing it myself.”
Nelson and I are drinking strong coffee in his studio in Crystal Palace, London. I say studio – it is actually much more like a curiosity shop. Around us are lamp bases, Ladybird books, a bust of Nelson (Horatio, not Mike), old tyres, motorbike helmets, shovels, leather belts, ruined footballs, an old model ship with a broken mast, pliers, convex mirrors, driftwood, a transistor radio, a Bakelite telephone. Even the loo is interesting (“I couldn’t stand looking at the plastic piping so I replaced it with copper”).
The work of building the exhibition has been going on elsewhere, in a freezing former Argos in Orpington, Kent, where there’s enough space for Nelson and his small team to remake his installations – “a strange act of resuscitation,” he calls it. When people re-describe his older works to him, he tells me, they often mention details that were never really there; the works exist in people’s minds in a state of creative misremembering. He’ll play with his own faulty memory for this survey, he tells me – “I’m thinking of myself as in an incredibly large attic, pulling down boxes, and not quite knowing quite how it all goes back together again.”
That turn of phrase reminds me of one of his works called The Amnesiacs. It was about a gang of army-veteran bikers, their memories half-wiped owing to trauma, whom Nelson once invented; he built the kind of sculpture that he thought they would make. The title of the Hayward survey, Extinction Beckons, comes from a sticker on an old biker helmet belonging to one of his fictional Amnesiacs.
Nelson often thinks of his work in loosely literary terms. The Coral Reef, for example, “was a series of reception rooms that led to one another, like a series of introductions to books that don’t exist.” That allowed for a “freedom to play” to make those detailed and lovely and creepy environments, and to give space for the audience’s imaginations to play, too.
Nelson, who is 55, and was raised in the East Midlands, has always been something of an outlier among his peers in Britain. He is hugely successful: as well as representing Britain at Venice he has twice been shortlisted for the Turner prize. But he has never had a glamorous, super-commercial gallery. Another sculptor said to me: “If there’s a really difficult way of doing things, Mike will find it.” Nelson says: “I’m not averse to selling art, but I didn’t want to have that freedom of making taken away by [the commercial] element taking control.”
At the opening of the Venice Biennale in 2011, he was horrified to see huge queues forming to see his work. “The idea of the queue became greater than the work itself, and that was depressing, even though I was very grateful to the people who did queue. I felt like I’d been co-opted at Venice, as if I was the flagship for a huge trade show.” So he switched tack, moving away from his great detailed, semi-narrative environments towards more traditionally sculptural work such as The Asset Strippers, an installation in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2019 of pieces of defunct British industrial machinery displayed as if they were modernist sculpture. He has a loathing of being co-opted, of being swept into some fashionable group.
I am curious about one particular image in the catalogue for the Hayward show. It shows him – with a dog apparently paying rapt attention – tracing a square, a circle and a triangle into the dust with a stick. In response, Nelson tells me the entire story of this picture, which came about when he did a residency in Bucharest in 1996, accompanied by his partner. “We were meant to get a flat and a studio and a stipend,” he says. “But the flat turned out to be a room in between two typing pools in a comedy theatre. At 8am every day, the typing started. We shared a toilet with all the typists.” The woman meant to be looking after them never answered the phone, and “when she did, she either had toothache or her mother was dying”. They bought a little gas cooker and put it on the windowsill. The view was over a courtyard and to a sanatorium beyond, where “men in striped pyjamas were feeding the birds and smoking cigarettes through the barred windows”.
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He says it was “hard to find food. It was hard to know exactly what we were doing. We just met a lot of dogs, because the place was awash with dogs, there were packs of dogs on every corner and we befriended them. There was the crocodile dog, the fat dog, the black-eyed dog, and Vasile.” Vasile is the star of the photograph: “I was holding out a bit of sausage to him on the end of the stick, so he looked a lot more interested in my drawings than he would have done otherwise.” Under the weird circumstances, Nelson decided to make what he described as an educational exhibition for dogs, which consisted of detritus and rubbish pulled in off the streets with various tableaux built into it: “a still for making alcohol; a model of Tatlin’s tower”. “I had the idea that the dogs could come in and enjoy it. But to the dogs the matter, the material, would be as interesting as what we’d done with it – that sense that sculpture is constantly falling back into the very matter from which it’s made, and then coming into vision as something suggested – that’s exactly what I’m interested in.”
The story ended happily, in the sense that one day, a couple poked their heads in through the window of the gallery and uttered, in English, the tremendously surprising words, “Oh, you are making an installation”. They turned out to be Dan and Lia Perjovschi, important Romanian artists with whom Nelson has stayed friends. Nelson suspects that the person supposedly in charge of him, operating under a long post-Soviet shadow, had deliberately tried to keep him isolated from the Romanian art scene. Still, the intense isolation of the time was clearly oddly generative, and feels like the kind of thing that could only have happened to Nelson, who was very much not getting drunk in the Groucho club and selling work to Charles Saatchi at the time.
A few days after we speak, I go to see The Book of Spells, an installation by Nelson that he made in a single room of a terraced house for Matt’s Gallery in London. It was briefly open during the pandemic, and will be so again this spring alongside the Hayward show. There’s a single iron bed frame covered over with a Turkish textile, and a sash window, boarded up from the outside. The room is lined with shelves which are covered in travel books – Lonely Planets, Rough Guides, the occasional Blue or AA guide. Some of them are duplicates; it feels as though an obsessive, perhaps desperate mind has put together this collection. They immediately put you out of time, these books. They were once such a touchstone of travel and adventure, and are now obsolescent in the face of the internet. Each marks a moment of history that in many cases is now unreachable: you won’t be holidaying in Moscow any time soon, nor in Aleppo. The room is tiny, claustrophobic, and there’s a strong reminder of the confinement wrought by Covid-19, but at the same time it feels like some kind of unwritten short story. (It reminds me, in fact, of Borges’ The Aleph, in which the narrator encounters, in a cellar beneath a bourgeois Buenos Aires dining room, a device from which it is possible to see every other point on Earth). It is intensely simple in its way and yet heavy with layers of association, and immensely eerie. Like all Nelson’s work, it creates a place and offers an invitation. The rest is up to you.
Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, from 22 February to 7 May
The Book of Spells is at Matt’s Gallery, London, from 24 February to 23 April 2023