An artist after Break Down

Michael Landy was last seen in Break Down, as a foreman in a disused Oxford Street department store housing a production line that disassembled, cut up and then ground into powder all his possessions, including his stock of unsold works of art. This event took place last year but he is still living in the wake of it, explaining to me that he is wearing a jacket given to him by Gillian Wearing, shoes given to him immediately after Break Down by one of its financiers, Karsten Schubert, and Tracey Emin's socks.

He is showing me around the stark space of Interim Art's upper gallery where, floating at generous distances from one another on its spotless walls, are delicate, obsessively detailed etchings of uprooted weeds, themselves floating in the midst of broad expanses of fine white paper. It seems, to say the least, a long way from Break Down to this new show, Nourishment.

Break Down left Landy without possessions and without art work to sell at the very time when, given the success of the event, demand would have been at its highest. There was a crass plan to bag up the granulated remains of his possessions for sale but such an act would have cut against the whole purpose of the event, which was after all to highlight the system of consumerism and get its viewers to ask how much their sense of self is bound up with what they own. So Landy had the residue, nearly six tons of it, buried at a landfill site. The artist, interestingly, does not think that his act of sacrifice and disposal has altered him much personally.

It is not quite true to say that Break Down left Landy with nothing, for he had kept a database of his disposed-of goods. He has since worked on completing and publishing an inventory of his 7,227 ex-possessions, detailing, numbering and classifying everything from the valuable components of his well-known 1990 show Market to an empty crisps packet (salt-and-vinegar flavour).

Landy is associated by age and training (at Goldsmiths) with the "Young British Artists", and the list of works destroyed in Break Down showed that he numbers many YBAs as his friends, yet his work has always demonstrated a strong social conscience that marked him off from his peers.

A constant strand in Landy's work is precisely that single-minded and uncompromising focus on what he undertakes, whether it is the methodical cataloguing of everything he owns or the decision to make life-size etchings of weeds which would record all the detail that he could discern, and had him poring over plants and the etching plates for months, and for as long as the daylight held out (12 hours a day, he says, in the summer).

The results are finely rendered prints, which systematically record every twist of root, bristle on stem and capillary hair on leaf. They seem to encourage two types of viewing; from a distance of a few feet, appreciating the overall shape of the grey masses against the paper, and taking in the structure of the weed, from flowers to root; and from a few inches, marvelling at the extraordinary level of detail.

From a distance, certainly, they have a conventional aesthetic appeal but closer up they contain a subtle surprise as, despite the abstracting force of monochrome and uniform lines on paper, the collection of bristles, thorns and wilting leaves hints not at aesthetic order but at the weed's defences, grubbiness and decay. Or, in other words, the view from a distance suggests Ruskin's moral and ordered view of nature, while up close one's nose is in uncomfortable proximity to a pavement or back lot in Bethnal Green.

For Landy, weeds are not just weeds. Nourishment is the reverse side of his major 1995 installation Scrapheap Services (bought by the Tate) in which, with a similar labour-intensive process that involved cutting thousands of little figures out of drink-cans, many of which were fed through a mechanical shredder, he commented on the fate of those considered surplus to the clean and orderly running of society.

Like the shopping trolleys and crates used in his previous work to build sculptural installations, weeds are common but overlooked objects. Landy speaks eloquently about their names, neglected histories, supposed medicinal qualities and the meanings that people used to attach to them. Canadian fleabane hitched a boat-ride across the Atlantic to colonise these shores; Oxford ragwort jumped the wall of the city's Botanical Gardens to run wild, and hybridised with the native species; the building of the railways granted mobility to plants as much as people; the pods of shepherd's-purse look like what it is named after, but the plant was also called "mother's heart" since they would burst open revealing red tissue when pressed with the fingers.