Michael Landy laid bare: “I don’t spare anything”

It’s the eyes that say the most. In the first room of Michael Landy’s exhibition ‘Look’ at Hastings Contemporary, I am met with his 2025 pencil drawing Self Portrait at the Age of 62. It is delicate yet decisive, with expressive fine marks gathering around his features and blank paper dominating smoother parts of his face. His eyes are larger than life, piercing though not confrontational, settled into a complicated frown onto which I find myself projecting an assortment of feelings. With his furrowed brow and one eyelid folding over his left eye, I see him as worried and vulnerable.

“There’s more in my face now, more lines, more veins,” he tells me when we meet at his spacious warehouse studio on Vyner Street. The British artist began drawing himself in the mirror aged 40. This drawing took a fortnight of observing, rubbing out and correcting. “I really look, I don’t spare anything.” In the first room at Hastings Contemporary, this ambiguous portrait represents one lone human amongst a mass of 2024 weed etchings – also rendered meticulously – which celebrate overlooked and devalued plants. “They don’t need us,” he tells me about his attraction to weeds. “They prosper without being nurtured. They grow out of the side of buildings, move along railway lines. People will say ‘don’t be weedy’ as a negative, but they’re very sturdy.”

The lost and discarded are important subjects for Landy. In 2010, his “art bin” transformed South London Gallery into a creative dumping ground, with artists and the occasional curator – given pre-approval from the works’ makers – depositing failed or unwanted pieces into a giant trash receptacle. “There are no monuments to failure,” he tells me about his drive to make the piece. In a more extreme act nine years earlier, his installation Break Down involved the obliteration of all his belongings. He likens the work to a funeral. Friends from his foundation course came to watch and his mother broke down in tears.

While these dramatic, immersive explorations of self-destruction have grabbed headlines, it is the quieter end of his practice that comes to the fore in Hastings. The lighting is dimmed, pulling us close to the works in order to see their details. Landy tells me he is “a reluctant fine artist.” He discovered drawing early on, understanding the world around him in childhood through quiet observation. “People always said I was good at copying, but I didn’t have much of an imagination,” he smiles. “It’s harsh criticism; it stayed with me.” He started the weed etchings after completing Break Down, a moment of “elation” that nonetheless urged him towards the solitude of the studio.

The second room expands the idea of disposability in a deeply personal manner. In 1977, his father had an industrial accident while working as a tunnel miner. He was 37, spent the next six month in hospital, and another four decades at home, as Landy describes it, “withering away”. The artist comes from an Irish Catholic family, living in Hackney then Essex. His community was focused around the church and social club, with manual work forging masculine identity and purpose. Landy’s father was a haunting presence in Break Down, as his sheepskin coat travelled around the conveyor belt in a yellow tray for two weeks before being destroyed. “By the end [of the show], the coat really became him. My mum and dad came to this country to make better lives for themselves so they couldn’t quite comprehend what made me do that.”

Soon after, the artist moved back in with his parents for a sprawling residency and installation with Tate’s Duveen Galleries. Becoming artist-in-residence at his family home at the age of 40, he began drawing studies of his father; a natural way in, he tells me, as his dad was so used to him drawing as a child. He then expanded into other mediums, like video and sound, eventually recreating the house to scale. Landy accessed his father’s NHS records, struck by the dismissive way he was spoken about. “My dad was written off a total wreck case. It had a profound effect on me, my mum and sisters. My dad never wanted to do anything other than being a tunnel miner. He was left to vegetate; I bore witness to that.” Over the years and through these works, Landy watched his father’s physical form diminish, as his sense of purpose slipped away.

Some of the drawings are shown in ‘Look’. His father’s belongings – a densely detailed red comb and dragonfly with crumpled wings – are depicted small and stranded within a sea of white paper. Landy describes a shelf of his father’s items as an alternative portrait, featuring DIY paraphernalia he used to do jobs around the house. “As he deteriorated, the house did as well. He lost interest. There was a bit of fluff under the shelf which my mum wasn’t allowed to clean. When the heating was on, the air would make the fluff dance and I became transfixed. It looked like a figure hanging, this accumulation of skin and human detritus.”

There are tender parallels drawn out between Landy and his father. In Bypass (2004), purple and yellow pencil graphically but gently depicts his father’s scarred leg following surgery. This sits across from Radical Orchidectomy for a Solid Mass in the Upper Pole of the Left Testis (2005), a crop of the artist’s genitals whose medical title belies its psychological subject matter. As he moved back home, he received his own diagnosis of physical destruction in the form of testicular cancer. “You get used to this body working and then it fails you,” he considers. Father and son’s disembodied, stitched-up parts call to mind the corporeal capability that is so wrapped up in clichés of manhood.

The artist did not initially share his diagnosis with his family, but this creation of parallel works allowed him to. “I never used to communicate anything to my family until it was a real emergency. I loved them but I never thought they could help me. Since I was drawing my dad’s scar, I thought I’d show him mine.” Landy and his father look alike – both have been mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn, he laughs, “People used to shout, ‘Alright Jeremy?’ in the street” – and the show features a portrait of both at similar ages. But beyond the physical, the artist readily acknowledges the challenges of keeping emotionally connected to our parents, who sometimes seem to come from vastly different worlds to our own.

“My dad was one of 13 children, kicked out when he was 16 – he never had any love. There were no great role models for him,” he tells me. “I really respect my dad, but if I met him in the pub and didn’t know him, would I have found a way in? I don’t think I would.” This exchange of scars and silent observation of his father’s life opens up a powerful, unusual connection between men with few words. “By the very nature of witnessing it, you hope to give it some worth.”