Ask Jeremy Deller how he became an artist and he will tell you it was because he couldn't find a job. He had completed an MA degree in art history at Sussex University in 1992, and an earlier BA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. His specialty was baroque art and architecture. But notwithstanding a brief stint in Waddington Graphics -- the ultimate blue-chip Cork Street art emporium -- he quickly knew that the art market was not the place for him.

Those who go to hear Deller speak at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre tonight, or visit his current show at Goodwater gallery, will marvel that he lasted a minute. On the evening I met him, fresh off the plane from London, he was wearing a red and white wide-striped T-shirt, a loosely knotted necktie, a plaid jacket and black cowboy boots. He was forever running his hands through his shaggy hair, and the conversation rambled, with Deller forever being reminded of something else, fiddling with the volume on the CD player, or jumping up to play a cut from one of his compilation CDs.

These recordings consist of music harvested from the world he moves through, like this year's CD This is Us, a document of local music making from the community of Red Hook, New York. (The disc includes cheerleaders, hand-bell ringers, a Sunday school choir and the local Highlander's band). This is Us is the most recent in a series of vernacular or "folk" recordings by the artist. "Warhol said that pop art was about liking things," Deller has written, referring to his appropriative techniques, "whereas for me, folk art is about loving things." Deller may have started out as an art historian, but he has ended up a historian artist, gathering fugitive evidence of the here and now.

It took him a while to get there. After finishing his degrees, Deller kicked around London designing T-shirts ("My Drug Shame," "My Booze Hell" in block capitals); making calling cards ("Lost for Words," "My Mate Fancies You," or "Please Help Me. I Went to a Single Sex Public School"); creating street art (a road sign reading "Brian Epstein Died for You"); and proclaiming via posters the merits of Emmanuel Swedenborg.

It wasn't until his Acid Brass project of 1997 -- for which he hired Manchester's famous Williams Fairey Brass Band to perform custom-arranged instrumental versions of various Acid House anthems -- that he established himself as an artist. Deller drew a parallel between Acid House and the British tradition of the brass band; both have their roots in the working class, and both are seen by Deller as expressions of dissent and class solidarity. Curators took note, and Deller's Acid Brass (which sounds, at times, like a peppy James Bond soundtrack) was performed with much fanfare at the opening of the Tate Modern in 2000.

For his next big project, The Battle of Orgreave (2001), Deller hired war re-enactors and local workers to perform the legendary South Yorkshire conflict of 1984-85, a showdown between miners, management, the British government and the police that defined the Thatcher crush-and-control approach to labour relations. Deller recorded the re-enactment, intercutting his footage with archival photographs of the real event and testimonials of participants, their families and other witnesses. The project, funded by the Tate and Artangel in London, was then aired on Britain's Channel 4 last year.

Deller's book The English Civil War: Part II sweeps up the bits and pieces on the cutting-room floor, pulling together the media notices from the Orgreave conflict, correspondence and written communiqués from both miners and management, as well as resistance folk songs, photographs, opinions and personal testimonials. He was making a new kind of history book in which the historian as master-narrator gives way to the historian as scavenger, shoring up for posterity the remains of the receding past.

A residency at the California College of Arts and Crafts last year, he says, provided a welcome relief from the profound Britishness of the Orgreave project. Deller usually works on commission, and his next venture was funded by the Capp Street Project in San Francisco. The resulting work, a book called After the Gold Rush (2002), is a kind of alternative guide book, documenting the artist's encounters with lotusland and its denizens.

The CD accompanying the book begins with a recording of an auction sale: $3,000 (U.S.) for a five-acre parcel of land in Trona, a small town out in the Mojave Desert, not far from Charles Manson's infamous Barker Ranch. The taker was Deller, who believed that buying empty land was the quintessential American experience. It was a start.

The book then takes us through various unofficial historical places -- Black Panther hangouts, the Exotic World Museum of Burlesque in Helendale (site of the Miss Exotic World Contest in 2002), the gift shop at San Quentin prison, the old Gold Rush sites, a Thomas Kinkade model village in Hiddenbrooke and the enormous Mormon Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Oakland, as vast and glacier-pure as Disneyland's Magic Kingdom. The CD features recordings of Deller's new neighbour, William Elliot Whitmore, who plays the banjo and sings his own songs. "On a few of the songs, you might here a rumbling," Deller's guidebook says. "This is the sound of fighter planes overhead."

More recently, Deller has been working in Texas on a residency with San Antonio's ArtPace, making a film "about bumping into people." ("It's a very polite, open society," he says of the Lone Star State. "They have time for people on an individual level. On a government level of course, it's otherwise. The government in the U.S. doesn't really represent the people.") Next will be a spell resettling in London, and a stint with the Frankfurt Ballet, where, he says, the dancers will be "doing things they wouldn't normally be doing."

He won't say more. He won't sit for a photograph -- allergic, he says, to the media hype around the YBAs. He won't talk about himself with any degree of comfort. Fidgety, wary, curious, a nomadic jackdaw with an eye for the telling detail, he won't have any trouble, either, keeping us tuned to whatever comes next.

Jeremy Deller will be talking about his work tonight at Toronto's Studio Theatre, 235 Queen's Quay West. Tickets $15. A small selection of his work can also currently be seen at Goodwater, 800 Dundas St. West (416-703-5222).