Imogen Lycett Green spends an afternoon with British-Iranian sculptor Abdollah Nafisi.

In a concrete yard enclosed by low stable buildings, painted black, and surrounded by dense woodland, I sit in my car. Everything is still. It is hot, one of the hottest days of the summer. I can hardly move. Over the fence, three horses stand under a tree flicking flies with their tails. Buzzards circle on the thermals, crying their plaintive mews. Am I in the right place?

Then I see two sculptures standing sentry by the stable, their bodies made of variously sized blocks of blackened wood stacked on iron poles. One rests on turquoise iron I-beams and sprouts turquoise rods that make you think of arrows or thorns. The other is more comical, its upside-down funnel head reminding me of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. A cubic orange iron tube juts from its side. I get out of my car and edge towards them. I touch them, they swivel, then I step back again, staring. Against a green forest backdrop, the two sculptures both belong and don’t belong.

I jump out of my skin as, from a ramshackle stable building, leaps their maker – British-Iranian artist Abdollah Nafisi, in cut-off denim shorts, a khaki work shirt and sunglasses. Nafisi opens his arms wide, enveloping me in a deep hug. Being English, I step back a few paces. “Imogen! Welcome! You found us then!” The sculptures are as high as him and the left-hand one is headed for Tanzania, he tells me, grinning broadly. As he leans on it, our conversation zips from this work to the football (England lost to Argentina last night), to this hideaway in the woods, from William Morris to Africa, where he has just been.

“The Tanzanian project came off the back of my Frieze show through UNESCO.” Nafisi felt strong roots in their country. “The people look at you from the depths of their eyes. They took me in. They gave me unconditional love, showing me incredible generosity and hospitality and taking time to educate me on their history of the slave trade,” he says. “There are parts of the planet that feel ancestral to all of us, and Tanzania is one of them. Home is one thing, but roots are another.”

And home is…? He stops short of saying ‘where the heart is’, but explains, without preamble, “I fell in love with Kate [his wife of nine years] here. She grew up in Wimbledon. She is soooo English. I taught her how to say ‘I love you’ and I taught her family to hug each other. Home is where Kate is.” Then he says he wants to give me a book. Leaving me sweating, juggling recorder, handbag, notebook and pencil, he runs to the van and returns brandishing a red paperback – All About Love, by bell hooks. “You must have it,” he says. “It’s a feminist book about how to read the world through love.”

I notice he is panting from the short run. “I have bad asthma,” he says. I put the book in my car so I won’t forget it, then focus on a brass kettle with a long spout, painted yellow, sitting on an old printing press in the yard. “I like this,” I say, stroking its warm sphere, dreaming of a cup of tea. He takes the kettle, thinks for a moment, then places it on top of the right-hand sculpture, where it counterbalances the orange metal cube projecting from the other side. “I love it,” he says. “I’ll keep it just there.” Does he normally ask strangers to finish his sculptures? “I always ask for help. I have an idea, but I ask people to help me. You cannot say to someone – make me an artist! But you can ask, ‘What would you do with this problem?’ Every artwork is a series of small questions. You refine one after another and slowly they become part of a bigger thing.” He pauses. “I can think about a sculpture for two years – drawing, finding material – then execute it in a month. But I keep coming back, looking.”

“When is it finished?”.

“Usually when the work’s sense of dialogue becomes apparent and somebody offers to buy it.” An eyebrow raises behind his dark glasses.

Then he opens another stable door to show me a work you can put your head inside – Bouncer (2023). He places his head into the blackened wooden block, then invites me to do the same. I inhale the scent of ash wood, and he encourages me to hum. “I’m useless at meditation,” he says. “I wanted to make a space to go inside the tree.” He works with ash to remember its power. “Through the mycelium underground, ash trees talk to each other, but for whatever reason the links have been broken, so we have ash dieback. I place blocks of ash next to blocks of oak so they are in conversation. The oak represents ancient wisdom, strength and courage. The ash is more vulnerable. I am very conscious of materials.”

People visit him here, fall in love with him and the place, and buy work. I can see how it happens. Finally, after two hours in the midday sun, he leads me inside to an air-conditioned white space where his freestanding sculptures are shown to their best advantage. “I like to build work in this space so I can see how it will look in a gallery,” he says.

Beyond is a book-lined cavern with low seating, speakers, computers, guitars, a projection screen and shelves of LP box sets – Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Puccini. We meet Kate, pale and slim, dressed all in white, and immediately welcoming. “You must be so hot!” She bids me put my feet up and brings me water, walnuts and blueberries. Abdollah whispers, “She’s changing the world.” It turns out his beloved wife is Kate Pincott, who works at tech company Multiverse, helping companies navigate AI.

We have moved from the Wealden woods to a James Bond-level Tardis. The music playing is a kind of sound bath. Abdollah composed it. “I love opera,” says Nafisi. “I sing all the time.” He improvises, plays guitar and harmonica, is fascinated by sound, and has wired speakers inside trees so that, in different rooms, you can hear them breathing.

“Air is the one commodity we all share,” he says. “There is no ideology attached to air. Trees give us the air we breathe.” I think how precious air is to an asthmatic. “My material comes from this vital component – the air-making trees. Through the bodies of trees, we stay connected to the woodland.”

But is he connected to his homeland? Abdollah’s family included artists, architects and scientists. One forebear translated the first French-Persian dictionary; another is the popular musician Soheil Nafisi. “My people were academics. We never had money, but we were entrepreneurs.” The dinner table in Tehran was alive with ideas. “My friends loved coming to our house.”

Aged 16, he came to England with his father – an inventor and Sufi who lectures on the 13th-century poet and mystic Rumi – and attended Cranfield University near Bedford to study engineering. “I had three English words – apple, orange and umbrella.” After nine months Abdollah went home. But before he left his history teacher, Mr Featherstone, said: “Go back home and translate our history to your people. Then come back here and bring your history of Persian poetry and language and painting and architecture to us.”

“What he said made complete sense to me,” says Abdollah. “You know those moments when your life changes? That was one for me.” He returned to Iran, finished school, studied Persian nomadic tribes and lived among them for several years before arriving in London aged 27. “I found this harmony in London – everyone together. Opportunity. You can start conversations, manifest things and make them happen. It is not the same in Iran.”

He met Kate and together they started a business making Sussex chairs, based on Philip Webb’s late-19th-century original. Abdollah felt a strong pull towards Webb, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, which was – like Sufism – about love and connecting humans with nature. Then the BBC filmed him making a Sussex chair from tree to finished piece. “Everything took off,” he says. The business flourished, but he realised he wanted to make art more than furniture, so he returned to study at the Royal College of Art.

“Rumi is all about love,” says Abdollah, repeating a refrain that runs through his life and work. “So I read Western philosophy – Kant, David Hume, Heidegger – to give me fragments to work with.” He talks about Mark Rothko. “I want to put my head inside his paintings, but I don’t know why. I am curious. I don’t make work to answer questions, I make it to ask them.” He tells me about a priest friend who says people arrive at church alone with their struggles, then sing together. “People can gather round my work like that, I hope. But I want to remain humble. Kate is good at reminding me of that. I want to be of service.”

We look at Neighbours (2023), his most acclaimed piece, first exhibited at Frieze and, for now, standing here in the woods. I am so moved by it that it also makes me laugh. It is joyous. Two horns face one another, almost touching, mounted on intricate iron structures that fit together like Lego, allowing the sculpture to be dismantled, moved and rebuilt. It immediately feels human – an embodiment of dialogue. “Yes!” exclaims Abdollah. Conversation – honed around the dinner table in Tehran – is everything to him. He believes certainty leads nowhere, while dialogue can create stronger relationships. The US has bombed Iran again only that morning, and when I ask how he feels, he returns to the same point: listening and creating community are the only lasting ways to resolve conflict. Even with people whose views he profoundly disagrees with, he believes conversation must come first.

Abdollah grew up in a rigid system where doors are shut. “Here, I can write to anyone and ask them anything,” he says. “I have not suffered from racism, because of the lens I choose to listen from. I just expect everyone to talk with me, and they do. This is the strongest community and everyone helps each other.”

When all his tools were stolen a few years ago, local agricultural merchants replaced them with £10,000-worth of new equipment. The local blacksmith, mechanic, landowner and wood merchants are his friends. “Everyone gives me material. They gather here, I cook for them, and these people are my best friends.” He expands: “People think there is a hierarchy in this country, a system set in stone, but that is not the truth. When I was making chairs, I wrote to John Makepeace and asked if he would mentor me. He wrote back immediately and I spent the day with him, learning.”

In Iran that would not happen?

“You have to know someone who knows someone with power. You are held in place. Here, by contrast, you can make friends with anyone. You just have to be open to it.”

We move to a delightful outdoor space that Abdollah built himself, roofed in clear corrugated plastic, where bracken and rosebay willowherb grow into the room. Via Facebook Marketplace he rescued a dying palm tree from a concrete garden in Haywards Heath and planted it here. It is flourishing. “It reminds me of Iran, and is so odd here in the English forest,” he says.

He has also reinvented the barbecue, placing the fire at the centre of a low table so everyone cooks and eats together. “Why are barbecues always away from the guests, so you turn your back to cook?” he asks.

Kate reappears with a huge tin bowl of peppery pasta. We sit around the fire and Abdollah offers to cook aubergines. I have to leave soon, but wish I could stay. He pokes at the fire, leans back and removes his sunglasses. Only now can I see he is tired. He has been talking almost non-stop for four hours. One last word. “If you create an object, the person brings their subjective self to it. You cannot tell people what to feel or think. They will simply respond. My role is to give them a starting point.” Then, after a pause, he adds: “I am celebrating life with my bare hands. I just want to prove that being human is amazing.”