The Dura's Saint Jerome is an influence on this wonderful piece of yours which is a kind of reconstruction of the studio you had made in your front room in south London way back. Originally I made a version of it for a British council touring show so I rebuilt the desk that's in my front room that we're going back 20, 30 years nowthis front room from the 90s up until 2003 and so this was a work that was brought by the British Council and was in a touring show around South America back in the early 2000s but when I came to make the show in Chippewaft Canyon with the wood shared but also with there was an octagonal cinema reception. This
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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