The shy man of the Turner

Not many Turner Prize nominees have only ever sold two works of art in their whole career. Mike Nelson is probably the first. This would be a freakish state of affairs at any time, but, given the art market's glittering high - witness its ongoing love affair with i-D and Vogue - it suggests either that Nelson's work is dreadful, or that he's going out of his way to be awkward.

With forthcoming shows at the ICA and the Tate this autumn, it's almost certainly not the former. Nelson, 34, doesn't play the conventional art world game. He doesn't make the kind of work that adds instant glamour to your lounge, nor, for that matter, will you find him out schmoozing patrons and necking champagne at glitzy parties. He's media-shy, serious about his work, and tends to stay put in Balham, where he lives with his partner, artist Rachel Lowe, and their 11-monthold daughter Isabel.

Nelson is bracing himself for the onslaught of tabloid attention that annually befalls the Turner Prize shortlist, but he'd prefer simply to hide behind his work. In Nelson's case this might just be possible: the installations he makes are big (we're talking 15 rooms big), grubby and labyrinthine. You don't look at his art so much as have a one-off adventure inside it.

Take, for example, his latest piece, currently on show in Venice, The Deliverance and The Patience. The journey Nelson makes you undergo inside this transformed ex-brewery is an apt parallel to the work's title, named after two 17th century ships built by shipwrecked castaways en route to America. Pushing open door after door, you encounter an eerie series of abandoned scenarios: an empty naval-themed bar, a bare bedroom with a scruffy mattress, an empty sweatshop, an oldfashioned polling booth. Not knowing what's coming next or who you're going to meet gets the adrenaline racing: it's like starring in a film with a script that's yet to be written.

It takes two to three months for Nelson to make each of these epic works, and he does the bulk of it himself, calling in a couple of assistants for big jobs like erecting walls. He grew up in Leicestershire, where his mother was a painter and decorator, and the DIY gene clearly lives on in Nelson's knack for choosing just the right shade of paint to make you feel queasy, quiet or unwelcome.

He completed his MA at Chelsea School of Art in the early Nineties and was immediately picked up by Robin Klassnik, director of Matt's Gallery, who was then external examiner for the course. Nelson has now clocked up several shows at Matt's, but attention only really started to flow last year with his installation The Coral Reef. The contents of its 15 rooms are currently in storage "somewhere under the Hayward Gallery", but may be making a partial reappearance in the Turner Prize - the Tate cannot spare anything like the two to three months he usually needs to install a major new work.

Nelson is concerned, however, that people are going to expect the same kind of impressive stunts he's delivered at Matt's and in Venice. I ask if this is a problem - aren't his works just a bit too much fun for the viewer? This doesn't worry him: "I like the work to be accessible, and I think it's important to make work that's visually and aesthetically pleasing. And hopefully people's experience of the work will have many layers - so they'll think back in a few months' time and different aspects of the piece will come together." Hopefully he's right, but unpicking the tangled net of references that underpin each installation can be hard work. Without Nelson's verbal crib sheet you'd need several years and a PhD in Eastern European literature to work out all the links: Russian sci-fi, pulp fiction, Tarkovsky, Burroughs, the Strugatsky Brothers, Lem, Borges, B-movies, Eighties anarchist tracts - you name it, the breadth of his reference is mesmerising.

Nelson rattles off his influences with the effortless enthusiasm of someone who gets lost in fiction on a daily basis. His own installations share this novelistic approach, and the realism owes everything to lovingly attentive detail: a crappy old Seventies travel poster, a dodgy leather jacket slung over a chair, an enormous conch shell, a cold mug of tea. It tends to be stuff he's found on the street near where the work is made, because ideally he'd like to give the impression you've just stumbled on a situation that's actually there: Nelson loves the moment when "something happens in your mind - logically you're telling yourself it's not real, but you're being convinced that it is". This is something he sees as setting him apart from what he calls "theatrical" installations - such as Gregor Schneider's claustrophobic cellar in Apocalypse at the Royal Academy - which bear no relation to their environment.

This low-budget, found-object ethos is an important part of Nelson's modus operandi. If there's a meta-theme that brings his current preoccupations together, it's a concern with alternatives to the all-consuming monster of global capitalism. Each room symbolises a sub-group of society or stands for certain ideas, but Nelson seems to present them all in a melancholy light.

You get the impression that the alternatives he lays out aren't really viable and are ultimately utopian or escapist: a "failed socialist gambling den" is next to a tarot card parlour, which is just along the corridor from a dodgy, definitely non-Abta-registered travel agents.