The tire piece really was that was back in the late 90s as well. The idea to put the ties in the sand came to me exactly this week last year when I was with two good friends Richard, Richard Grace and the city trees down in the Pyrenees. It felt like the end of time you know if they kind of the scene at the end of the road but you find yourself instead in the in a museum to the first hominid it just seemed kind of perfect somehow and I thought well maybe I can a sense of this in the hay would be kind of nice.
Ben Luke talks to Mike Nelson about his influences—from the worlds of literature, film, music and, of course, art—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Nelson, born in 1967 in Loughborough in the UK, is one of the most significant British sculptors and installation artists of this century. He has spent the past three decades assembling materials gathered in junkyards, flea markets, online auctions, even street-corner fly tips into often labyrinthine sculptural environments. He creates distinctive spaces that suggest fictional (and often science-fictional) narratives, while alluding to diverse histories, obscure countercultural or political movements and current affairs as well as his own biography. He discusses the early influence of Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon, his elation at discovering the work of Paul Thek, how fiction—and science-fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem, J.G. Ballard and the Strugatsky brothers—liberated his approach to art making, and the enduring influence of film-makers including Jean-Luc Godard and Sergei Parajanov.
Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons, Hayward Gallery, London, until 7 May.
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