He’s built a cannabis farm, invented a biker gang, and created an immersive warren of 15 sinister rooms. As he opens a landmark retrospective, the installation artist invites us into his curiosity-crammed studio
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.
