A DEEPER RECESS 008: an interview with Mike Nelson

We speak to artist Mike Nelson on the opening of his major new three-part installation at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh

29 June 2025

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An interview with Mike Nelson

Exhibition details available at: www.fruitmarket.co.uk/mike-nelson

When Mike Nelson mounted his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery (read our review HERE) the artist reconstructed some of his immersive earlier works. Interested in creating uncanny spaces from the detritus of capitalism and built worlds, his inhabitable sculptures that take visitors out of the gallery setting and into other-spaces feeding off sci-fi, fiction, past political hopes, and distant geographies led to two Turner Prize shortlistings and representing Britain at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

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At Fruitmarket, a gallery in Edinburgh, Nelson has created a new immersive for the first time in a decade (save for a smaller, though no less intriguing, project for Matt’s Gallery we covered HERE) and it forms one part of a three-element show taking over the lower and upper spaces of the older, white-walled gallery, and also the Warehouse space. Separate from the main galleries by the excellent café and shop, the Reiach and Hall Architects-designed Warehouse inhabited the space left by a former nightclub, stripped back into an industrial, double-height room held by a raw, revealed steel framework. When Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley first planned expansion into the space, she approach Mike Nelson to visit to get his thoughts on the possibilities, materiality, and how history could be present. His exhibition, Humpty Dumpty, is his first solo show at Fruitmarket, developed from those discussions but initiated by Bradley after Nelson’s 2011 Venice presentation that incorporated elements of his earlier works at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial.

Nelson re-uses not only materials, but ideas in his practice. Turkey recurs again here with photographs the artist made of Mardin for the city’s 2nd biennial, where he presented a map of his observations of the city physically ruptured as it upgraded itself, revealing its history in the process. Above it in the upstairs gallery, Nelson presents a series of new sculptures made over the last two months in situ, utilising materials found across Edinburgh, glass from a previous Fruitmarket show, and photographs he made in 2014 at the Heygate Estate in south London, an Elephant and Castle post-war slab-block housing scheme then undergoing violent demolition and now completely disappeared underneath a neoliberal reshaping of London that has removed not only architecture but communities.

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While making these sculptures, Nelson set up shop in the Warehouse, which he named the “engine room” for the duration. Here he not only made the sculptures and printed large prints but created a beguiling architectural immersive work formed of the interiors of two of the Heygate apartments. Originally working with Artangel to create a large-scale ziggurat sculpture from several of the social homes after residents had been forcibly evicted, the project was cancelled in the face of local opposition with accusations of artwashing and insensitivity to the lives that had lived in the homes, and indeed neighbours observing the art installation whilst undergoing their own eviction.

Nelson’s installation here is formed of the interiors, and some artefacts from, two of those Heygate flats. A decade passing may have softened suggestions of appropriation of another’s lived experience, but these are still haunted and sombre spaces. In amongst the debris and objects are food containers and items with Turkish writing on, a knowing intermingling of architectural upheavals across different territories and times and their impact upon residents and societies within, as well as one of many strands interlinking the three components of Humpty Dumpty.

In this exclusive interview, our editor Will Jennings started off by asking Mike Nelson about the unrealised Artangel project for the Heygate Estate: