The real creator behind Britart

Should you require any of the following: a stainless-steel Tardis, a 15ft-high cheese grater, or a tank for a pickled shark, there's only one man to make it. This is Mike Smith, the man who fabricates sculptures for Mark Wallinger, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst and a seriously impressive roll call of other internationally hot British artists. Without Mike Smith as Mr Fix-It, many well-known works of art would never have got beyond the stage of a midnight brainwave.

Based in a cavernous hangar off the Old Kent Road, Mike Smith Art and Design Fabrication is a surgery for young artists whose ideas come first and the faff of making comes second. Music blares away as a tribe of 15 lithe young techies in goggles, masks and white gloves go about the business of constructing young British art and the vitrines in which it is shown: aluminium, chipboard, light bulbs, boxes and steel are welded, sawed, blasted and buffed.

This may come as a shock to many who had imagined Rachel Whiteread making her own plinth for Trafalgar Square. The work was, in fact, made by Smith and 22 assistants, a project which occupied them for nearly two years.

"A lot of people don't get it," says Smith, "because they still think that artists make their own work. They imagine that Damien Hirst is welding and grinding, when actually he's off on a four-day bender."

Smith also began as an artist, subsidising his grant at Camberwell Art School in the Eighties by stretching canvases for his tutors. After college, he found this to be a lucrative way to fund his own studio - except that his contemporaries no longer used canvas. His girlfriend was at Goldsmiths, which led to contact with Hirst and his colleagues - they both showed in the New Contemporaries exhibition in 1990 and Smith's skills spread by word of mouth. His own sculpture fell by the wayside seven years ago.

Among the 140 artists he has worked for are Gary Hume, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk, Keith Tyson, Darren Almond, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Mona Hatoum, Cathy de Monchaux, Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

He also made the elaborate hanging-screen system for Doug Aitken's current show at the Serpentine. "If someone dropped a bomb on Mike Smith's studio," says sculptor David Batchelor, for whom Smith also makes works, "it would change the face of London's contemporary art world as we know it." He adds a wry parenthesis: "And perhaps that's no bad thing."

Smith, a discreet and thoughtful 40-year-old, is more reserved when it comes to judging the pieces he makes. "I don't want to compromise my fabrication integrity," he smiles diplomatically. "When I get to the end of a project, I do try to remove myself from deciding whether or not it's good art."

What annoys him, however, are artists who can't articulate what they want: "They can visualise it but they can't express it, because they don't have an understanding of materials."

Grasping what the artists are trying to achieve is where Smith excels, although he modestly admits that he still has to put in estimates for jobs with Hirst. "In fact there really isn't much competition in London," he says. "There are individuals who make a work for specific older artists like Anish Kapoor, Chris Burden, Dan Graham, and Sol Lewitt, and there are lots of foundries, but there is no one who works on this scale for my generation of artists."