A Pound of Flesh for 50p (2014), was a full-scale wax house, located in Southwark, which slowly melted away over 30 days

What was exciting to the young artist was not the precise mastery of technique for its own sake, but rather the ingenious means by which one might produce spectacle, and the overall capacity of spectacle to push the viewer out of complacency. Discussing an imminent work that involves tying a knot in one of the chimneys on Battersea Power Station, Chinneck confesses: 'The engineers who work with me are absolutely crucial, and they're the first people I speak to about an idea... If I can get my engineer to laugh, I know it's probably an idea worth going for.'

A Pound of Flesh for 50p (2014), was a full-scale wax house, located in Southwark, which slowly melted away over 30 days

Chinneck often starts with the effect, the trick, the 'wow' factor. This is art which deliberately does not require its viewers to have a formal training in order to feel moved or even involved -- the everyday nature of Chinneck's urban canvas means that the havoc he wreaks feels unnervingly close. In fact, by situating itself within the fabric of 'normal' life, an uncanny disturbance is precisely what Chinneck's work achieves: in a Brechtian sense, his work is a 'making strange,' a deliberate, non-naturalistic framing device, which challenges the audience with surprising or incongruous effects.

That said, Chinneck's works often have a necessary subtlety, but once you've done the double take, you can't unsee it. In fact, although he produces prominent pieces of spectacle -- increasingly so with recent projects such as in Covent Garden -- it is precisely when Chinneck's work is not shouty that it holds more intense potential. 'The most recent work is very spectacular, but early projects are very quiet,' he agrees. 'I've got to a point in my practice where it's hard to return to that kind of modesty. Partly hard for me, but partly it is to do with what people expect, which makes me slightly anxious.'

Take my Lightning but Don't Steal my Thunder (2014) in London's Covent Garden was Chinneck's most challenging project to date

I must have walked past the broken windows of my favourite of Chinneck's pieces a dozen times before paying real attention to it. Telling the Truth through False Teeth (2012) is an installation in a soon-to-be demolished industrial building, teetering on the edge of a petrol station forecourt in Hackney.

The dramatic image of a hanging portico matched Covent Garden's cultural heritage of performance and spectacle

Unremarkable at first glance, the derelict building has 312 identically broken panes of glass in the grimy metal window frames. All of a sudden, the banal structure acquires a weird air of mystery, even alarm. Who -- or what -- caused this? Maybe an explosive industrial accident, or was it the nefarious work of some obsessive-compulsive vandal?

The false portico was treated to match the historic urban fabric; a counterweight is disguised as a market stall at one side

Facades -- both actual and figurative -- have been the active architectural element in several of Chinneck's works. Acting directly on the surface of the places we live in, he warps the fabric of the familiar, with results that are sometimes comic and often disturbing. Chinneck's pieces harness the uncanny, trading on the incomprehensible and often unbelievable changes to things we thought we knew. How long has that house been completely upside down? Perhaps the inside is inverted too, with its furniture on the ceiling?