A curmudgeon with a wicked laugh, installation artist Bedwyr Williams is known for the rebellious humour of his work, which once saw him dissect a life-sized curator made of cake and serve up its sugary entrails to the well-heeled Frieze crowd.

The engaging aspects of his performance work have been described as ‘stand-up’, but he’s adamant that doesn’t make him a comic. In fact, there are few things that spark his entertainingly studied irritation so much as the mention of an open mic night.

‘I’d go to see a comedian, one comedian,’ he reasons, from his home in rural Wales, ‘but I wouldn’t go to see three or four of the f*ckers. I don’t understand why you’d want to go and see four or five guys trying to make you laugh. It’s like going to a tickling club.’

Bedwyr Williams (it’s pronounced Bed-weer) has plenty of opinions, some of which he gives vent to in pieces with names like Shit Show and My Bad, but presumably also in vernacular Welsh, which is what he speaks at home with his two children and TV producer partner. Born in St Asaph in 1974, he grew up in Colwyn Bay, or the ‘Costa Geriatrica’ as he calls it, and now lives along the coast in a village near Caernarfon, where he works in a shed-cum-studio in his back garden.

‘I hate vinyl,’ he continues to grumble, like an anti Choose Life cover version. ‘I hate bald men who wear those big headphones on the Tube. I hate DJs and record bags.’

Williams, who studied painting at Central Saint Martins in the 90s, applies this absolutism to most aspects of his life. He left London because he hated ‘the mid-week misery, the bullsh*t of finding somewhere to live, seeing some guy fall under the Tube’. And he doesn’t travel very often – ‘I have pale Celtic skin and I don’t like the heat’ – but this summer he’ll be in Venice, representing his native Wales at the prestigious Biennale.

He’s being coy about the work he’s taking with him in June – ‘It’s not quite an FBI secret’ – but we do know that it involves astronomy.  ‘There will be a telescope in there,’ he concedes. ‘That’s not a secret. The exhibition is going to be about amateur astronomers and escaping the here and now by looking out into the past, the far past of the universe. In a way, I’m not so much interested in the stars as in the people who are interested in the stars.’

Williams says there is no ‘typical’ work that represents his style, as he uses a variety of media but one of his trademarks is playing with scale, so that those attending The Starry Messenger in Venice will be made to feel like ‘tiny Borrowers in one room and like giants in the next’. No doubt, they can also expect a dose of wry Welsh dissent too.