Mike Nelson - Creating a story from objects.

Coral Reef is a labyrinth of 15 small rooms, created in 2000. It has dingy corridors between the rooms, mostly in a state of disrepair, conjuring up the impression of people having moved in, made them their temporary home, left very little impression on the space other than one or two belongings left behind and then moved on leaving very little to recognise the fact that they were there at all.

You get to wander around the rooms as an observer and really do feel like you’re outside of their world, looking in on a snapshot of their life. You get hints of each story from props and found objects – enough to know that there is a story to tell, but not enough to make any real sense of what it could be. It creates an impression of the story but nothing more.

I love that just by observing these lone objects you start to create stories in your head and piece different segments together to create a narrative.

Here is what the Tate have to say about it:

“To enter Mike Nelson’s The Coral Reef is to enter a parallel world. Rooms, doors, passageways, all bear traces of habitation and decay. Different, often conflicting, ideologies or belief systems are presented through these traces. The implied occupants of Nelson’s world appear to be detached from the political and economic centre, left to exist at the margins of globalised, capitalist society. The work’s title alludes to this collection of complex, fragile belief systems that form an obscured layer – a coral reef – beneath the ‘ocean surface’ of prevailing orthodoxies.”