Mike Nelson, Hayward Gallery review — immersive worlds rebuilt and reimagined

Climb the stairs at the Hayward Gallery in London and you come upon a remarkable sight: a vast sand dune strewn with burnt-out tyres fills the space, half-burying a shed in the process. I follow the curve of a scuffed white passageway on the right and push open a creaking door. Inside, another surprise: an old-style photographic lab, drenched in red light. No sign of the photographer; his or her latest prints, pegged to a line, have long since dried. Beyond the darkroom, a second room is collapsing under the sand. A half-buried Shell oil drum is all that remains.

For 30 years, Mike Nelson has been assembling found objects to build complex fictional worlds. “Nelson is a realist sculptor,” writes Dan Fox in the catalogue accompanying Extinction Beckons, the Hayward’s compelling survey of the artist’s work. “It’s just not clear which reality he’s sculpting.”

Nelson, 55, is best known for disorienting, immersive works such as “The Coral Reef” (2000) and “I, Impostor”, the Istanbul travellers’ inn he installed in the British pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. More recently, he has favoured objects over environments, but the aim is always to make sense of the moment. In “The Asset Strippers” (2019), he filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with manufacturing machines and agricultural tools in a sorrowful memorial to Britain’s recent industrial past. But you don’t need to have encountered Nelson before to enjoy his art. Indeed, with his immersive works, surprise counts for a lot: it is an advantage to know nothing of their past.

Born into a family of textile workers in the Midlands, he has a BA in fine art from Reading university and an MA in sculpture from Chelsea College of Art and Design. He was initially intent on being a painter but, under the influence of artists such as Richard Wilson, became absorbed in materials and gravitated to sculpture.

A key to Nelson’s art lies in his shift, when barely out of college, from quite didactic pieces to works with a looser narrative. The fiction of writers such as William S Burroughs and JG Ballard seemed to offer an approach that gave the viewer a way in. “You want the person to understand not the specific points but to occupy the gaps,” he said in 2011 and it is still his approach today.

For this survey, rather than rebuild past works, Nelson has reimagined them, breaking them up, recontextualising, adding something new. “The idea of trying to unravel the history I have made for myself and reconstruct it is rather daunting,” he says in the catalogue. “There’s a sense of revisiting another time in my life, of competing with my former self to try and reimagine something that can’t be made in the same way again.”

But reimaginings have long been Nelson’s stock-in-trade: “I, Impostor”, for example, grew out of work made for the 2003 Istanbul Biennale. With each iteration the layers of meaning build up. Entering the gallery space by a side door, you find yourself in a store room, crammed with furniture, fittings and timber and bathed in red light. By reusing the title “I, Impostor”, Nelson propels us back to his Venice Biennale intervention. But are we before or after the event? I became so engrossed in memories of Nelson’s pavilion that stepping back into one of the Hayward’s well-lit spaces, it took me a moment to remember where I was.

Next comes a reimagining of “The Deliverance and the Patience”, another Venice work, originally created for a derelict brewery to coincide with the 2001 biennale. (The work takes its name from two ships built under duress in Bermuda by survivors of a 17th-century shipwreck.) Like “The Coral Reef”, it offers a maze of rooms to get lost in, including two bars, a travel agent, a gambling den and a rather sinister altar/shrine. As so often with Nelson, the joy is in the details: a poster of a cigar-smoking Bertolt Brecht, pictured beside his poem “In Praise of Communism” (“It’s sensible/Anyone can understand it”); a summary of “Corrupt and Illegal Practices for the guidance of voters” from a local election; a mousetrap in the corner of the gambling den. Here as elsewhere in Nelson’s works, empty sleeping bags invite you to speculate on what happened to the people.

Absence of a different kind resonates through “The Asset Strippers”: Nelson’s reflection on the death of industry prompts thoughts of lost jobs, wrecked lives. On show here are just five of the machines, including a mechanical hacksaw and a splendid hay rake. Yet up there on their plinths, these relics take on a certain grandeur as they oscillate between being machines and being art, and reference Paul Nash, Max Ernst and Henry Moore in the process.

The shed in the sand reimagines “Triple Bluff Canyon” (2004) by inserting the photographer’s darkroom from “I, Impostor” into its interior. (Nelson cleverly links the two by updating the photographer’s pegged-up prints.) The original “Triple Bluff Canyon” was itself a reimagining — a reworking of land artist Robert Smithson’s “Partially Buried Woodshed”, which became a symbol of government cover-ups when the National Guard killed four anti-Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University, Ohio, in 1970. Making his work during the Iraq war, Nelson substituted sand for Smithson’s earth and added the oil barrels to evoke a Middle Eastern landscape. Today, littered with blown-out tyres, the piece evokes more recent conflicts and the environmental crisis.

Nelson’s narratives are about capitalism, colonialism, war and the environment. With a nod to the science fiction writer Stanisław Lem, he grapples with the future, embedding a full-size reconstruction of his studio into a sprawling wire-mesh enclosure full of concrete heads. In this wry parody of a studio as a site of creativity, a concrete mixer stands ready to make even more heads.

For the exhibition finale, I would have preferred a reimagining of the more theatrical “L’Atteso” (2018), for which he filled Turin’s OGR arts centre with abandoned cars and vans. Their headlights blazing and radios on, it was a real parking-lot mystery. But the show is less about theatricality and more about an artist seeking to define himself at this point in his career. Tucked away upstairs, “tools that see (the possessions of a thief) 1986-2005” (2016), underlines the point. An unexpectedly moving presentation of Nelson’s workbench, complete with tool belt, hammer, table saw and piles of nails, it is another tale of absence — a portrait of the artist, where the one thing missing is the artist himself.

To May 7, southbankcentre.co.uk