Temporary Worlds: Mike Nelson, Siân Davey and HOST at EAF25

Fictional Ruins in Mike Nelson: Humpty Dumpty

At Fruitmarket, Mike Nelson’s solo show extends his long-standing preoccupation with destabilised architectures and afterlives of unfinished or abandoned sites. Alongside a transient history of Mardin earthworks in the Lower Gallery, the Upper Gallery and Warehouse introduces low rise, a reconstructed ruin. 

Is this the remnant of a stripped-down site, excavated into archaeological ruin? Or is it a fabricated stage, too precise to be genuine? Nelson blurs the boundary between evidence and intervention. The Warehouse – scattered with workstations, an industrial printer, models and maps and a writing desk covered by documents – doubles as the outcome and the actual production site during the making of this exhibition. These functional remains, however, are overlaid with interferences too deliberate to be accidental: concrete rubble flooding the cavernous, dimly lit warehouse sealed off behind a rusty gate; a lone chair stranded on uneven ground; a narrow staircase rising only to be halted by a grid of steel rods, abruptly collapsing into futility.

Humpty Dumpty by Mike Nelson.

Is this a fictional ruin, or an alternative reality altogether? The installation positions visitors as explorers, detectives, even gamers, drifting through an architectural labyrinth of orientation and disorientation – a mind game. It is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite labyrinths, the Strugatsky Brothers’ alien debris, or Franz Kafka’s claustrophobic burrows. Nelson constructs a psychological topography where narratives of labour, abandonment, and memory collapse into one another.

What emerges is layered loss: of what once existed, of what never came to be, of parallel worlds forever out of reach. This immersive installation reveals the broken promises of modernity, both civilisational and societal. Nelson’s ruins speak directly to the Anthropocene condition: a world littered with unfinished projects and collapsing infrastructures, where the residues of human ambition outlast their function. They force us to inhabit a temporality where past utopias, present abandonment, and future anxieties converge. Is there any suggestion of rebirth? Will it open a space for alternative histories and imagined futures? The audience’s trust becomes essential, for Nelson offers no guarantees.

Siân Davey's Intimate Ecologies

If Nelson constructs ruins haunted by instability, Davey cultivates a living ecology of intimacy in The Garden at Stills: Centre for Photography. Transforming her once-neglected back garden into a wildflower sanctuary, she works at the threshold of photography and psychotherapy. The camera is never neutral, but Davey complicates this power. Situated within a collectively cultivated space, it becomes a medium carried out in this therapeutic geography: both biological site and psychic refuge.

Image from The Garden series by Siân Davey. Image courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.

Family, neighbours, and children become collaborators beyond mere subjects, choosing vulnerability, presence, and self-expression. The specific, piercing, unflinching gaze of children; the gentle embraces of loved ones stripped of pretence. Hair entwined like vines, vitality rising in summer and retreating in winter.

It is easy to imagine participants surrounded by wildflowers taller than themselves, facing the camera, catching glimpses of their own reflections among the blossoms. Growth and withering, flowers are caught in various phases of their life cycles, full bloom or half decay. People are freed to show their hidden self from the distractions and roles of daily life, crystallise the essence of their relationships, with self, with others, and with nature.

Image from The Garden series by Siân Davey. Image courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery, London.

As French philosopher Paul Ricœur reminds us, memory is not recovery but reconstruction. The Garden enacts precisely such a reconstruction of reality, drawing a single frame from myriad flux, capturing the eternal in the ephemeral, all naturally. Personal yet collective, the project becomes a communal family album and an act of world-building. If Nelson’s ruins expose the collapse of modern promises, Davey’s garden offers a modest counter-promise: that meaning and intimacy can be cultivated in shared, precarious ecologies, across cycles of life and care.

HOST: The Infinite Possibility of Temporality

Working with Outer Spaces – the charity granting artists zero-cost access to vacant office buildings since 2021 – HOST, the six-month residency during EAF, showcases how artists reclaim, rewrite, and reconstruct the meaning of space and reality itself.

Symbols of corporate ambition remain. Glass façades, polished atriums, and guarded lobbies were once designed to embody stability, hierarchy, and exclusivity. Their monumental style spoke of permanence and unchallengeable authority. Yet in their afterlife, these same structures are paradoxically repurposed: porous, temporary, open. Monuments to permanence now carry only transience, and the irony sharpens their resonance.

Temporality here acts as a countdown, an apocalyptic warning that redirects attention to the present. Every column and partition reminds us that the “concrete” is never fixed: that cycles of growth and decline govern not only buildings but our collective futures. Cubicles, corridors, and partitions; these office relics are constant reminders of the fragility of our desire for permanence, rooted in flawed promises of capitalism and the illusion of eternity.

Concrete, fluid. Fixed, flex. Within this contradiction, artists intervene gently but decisively – habituating, repurposing, reconstructing. The result is a misalignment of function and meaning, a re-staging of reality itself. Temporality becomes method and freedom: the residency folds past and future into a shared 'now' where memory and imagination intersect.

Outer Spaces’ model itself is liberating for its residents, artists, and makers (including myself, as a studio holder). If Nelson’s ruins reveal the broken promises of modernity, and Davey’s garden reconstructs intimacy, then HOST stages temporality as praxis – reminding us that in transience lies the possibility of renewal, and in the fluid lies the chance to re-script the 'concrete'.

Each exhibition offers a distinct strategy of (re)constructing reality: Nelson works through the language of ruins, building fictional architectures that destabilise our orientation and force us to confront the broken promises of modernity. Davey turns to intimate ecologies, cultivating a collective garden in which memory is not simply recalled but actively reconstructed, crystallising the eternal within the ephemeral. HOST, meanwhile, approaches temporality itself as a medium: reclaiming office buildings that once stood for permanence and efficiency, artists inhabit them in transitory, porous ways that expose the fragility of capitalist notions of stability.

Taken together, these practices sketch out strategies for world-making: the psychogeographies that shape our senses of place. We are in an altered reality that we must learn, urgently, to live in.

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Mike Nelson: Humpty Dumpty, Fruitmarket, until 5 Oct, free
Siân Davey: The Garden, Stills, exhibition ended
EAF X Outer Spaces: HOST, Edinburgh Art Festival Pavilion, exhibition ended