Smithson isn't an artist that I was particularly interested in aesthetically shall we say it kind of came to me through Ballard really the reading in Ballard. In a way sort of like the partially buried wood she had triple bluff canyon work it was a reaction perhaps to my not getting it but also sort of like a sense that perhaps you know when Nancy Holt spoke of it after his death I felt postures the politicized it because he didn't really want to do it and then Kent State shooting happened four feet from where Neil Young song cancer on four dead took place.
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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