Mike Nelson, whose practice stretches back to the early 1990s, is best known for hauntingly realistic built environments constructed from salvaged materials and time-soaked objects. Rich in narrative, these genuinely immersive sculptural worlds draw on cultural, political, and historical references to provide strangely moving, and often unsettling, experiences for the viewer.
While a major retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2023 saw Nelson rebuilding many of these installations, since representing the U.K. at the Venice Biennale in 2011, he has mostly focused on more object-based, sculptural works such as The Asset Strippers (2019), his acclaimed, politically charged transformation of Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries. For a recent exhibition at Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, Nelson pivoted back to environments again, re-creating the interiors of two former London council flats in the gallery’s Warehouse space.
Chris Sharratt: Let’s start with the title of your recent show at Fruitmarket, “Humpty Dumpty: a transient history of Mardin earthworks: low rise.” The “Humpty Dumpty” reference made me think of fragility, power, and the passing of time. What is its significance for you?
Mike Nelson: “Humpty Dumpty” is a title I’ve used before, in the exhibition “Studio Apparatus” (2025) at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva. For me, the reference originally comes from an interview with Robert Smithson, possibly his last interview before he died. He used “Humpty Dumpty” as an example to talk about entropy, which kind of linked back to Land Art and the way that things are constructed but also fallen down. From my perspective, the beauty of what I do—but also the problem—is that it starts off as a pile of material and becomes something, and often it returns back to that pile of material. . .
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