The centrepiece of Jeremy Deller's new show is a huge painting, 5ft by 3ft 6in.

In it a man, a Tory MP called Richard Benyon, is lying on a grouse moor. He is dead. His intestines are being pulled out in an almost elegant meaty loop by raptors.

"It's him being eaten by birds," the conceptual artist explains as he brings up an image of the painting on his laptop. We are sitting upstairs in Glasgow's Modern Institute which will house the painting as part of a new Deller exhibition.

"Not eaten alive," he continues. "He's dead. I don't quite know how he died in this painting. It's not clear. But these birds are picking at his entrails."

We both look at this painting. Deller starts identifying the birds of prey involved. A hen harrier, a red kite, a buzzard, a golden eagle. "It's very well painted," he says. "I didn't paint it, Stuart painted it. Stuart Hughes, who I work with a lot."

He clicks on the image to bring up the coiling entrails in more detail. "This isn't the finished article. There's a bit more blood on him now."

It is, Deller admits with a more than a hint of understatement, "slightly sensitive". Well, yes, given that Benyon is in real life still living, still the MP for Newbury, and still a multimillionaire landowner with land in the Highlands and London, where tenants on the New Era estate, Deller suggest, are fearful of a rent-hike driving them out.

In the room next door, large prints of rave-era smiley faces lie on the floor adorned with ancient axe-heads for eyes. Not installed yet is a film of a Lewis artist walking up to a stone circle, a film that will be projected onto a rock in the gallery. "I suppose it's a show about land," Deller summarises. "Weirdly it comes at a very sensitive time in this country."

There's that word again. We can talk about that, I say. "I know. That's what I was worried about." It seems today he's a little sensitive himself. It might have something to do with the fact that, the other month, Deller was among 200-odd famous people who signed a letter to the "dear voters of Scotland" pleading with them to stay in the United Kingdom.

And yet here he is doing a piece of work that looks at absentee land-ownership north of the Border. Actually, you could take it further. He does. "I haven't really expressed it in the work but it's a sort of clearance, isn't it?"

So what political position is he adopting towards Scotland, then? "It's complicated," he says. Let's make it simpler then. Why did he sign the letter? "Because I'm part of the United Kingdom. And I would like Scotland to stay as part of that. I don't want to lose part of my country. I love Scotland. I'm here all the time. I feel if it does happen, it would be a pity. For people not in Scotland."

Surprisingly he's not had much response to his signature, "apart from one person who was really angry. He's not even Scottish."

Thinking about it, I say, visual artists have been more circumspect than many creatives on the referendum vote. "Well, a lot of artists who I know are truly international artists, absolutely international and so maybe they ... I don't know what their opinions are. I know one and he's not yes.

"Scotland clearly has its own cultural identity, so I don't think it will make much difference culturally ... I shouldn't get into this."

He's uncomfortable with this conversation. Which is interesting, given he is such a political artist. Deller's perhaps best known for his recreation of the Battle of Orgreave, for which he persuaded 800 people including former miners and a few ex-policemen to take part in a re-enactment of one of the most infamous confrontations of the miners' strike.

But politics is not the only strand in his work. The smiley faces and axe-heads riff off his interest in shamanism and pop culture (in the past he's arranged for brass bands to cover acid-house tracks to gleeful effect). He is an eclecticist. Spend any time with him and you end up happily talking about Jimmy Savile, the return of rave, the trespass law (he has gone onto Benyon's land in Scotland to take photographs for the show) and the time he met Andy Warhol.

What does he say when people ask him what he does? "As time goes on, it's more clear. Basically I'm like a film director, but in terms of art. I do more or less whatever I can get away with. Often I use other people who have greater skills than I to make things with me or for me. A lot of artists have been doing that for years."

What I've always liked about Deller's work is its sense of theatricality; his desire to put on a show. Where does that come from? "I think it's probably going to church a lot as a kid and then visiting churches and museums and going to a lot of gigs and enjoying the spectacle of the concert. I studied a lot of religious painting. I do like the Baroque, the drama of it."

And people like the result. It's ten years now since he won the Turner Prize. Did it make his life easier or harder?

"A lot easier. It's like saying 'Oscar winner' or something.

"It's a short-hand that gives people some sort of interest in you, but also a confidence that you must be good.

"We as a society put a lot aside for prizes. It must be something to do with ancient history when prizes bestowed on people were very important. We still take these things as badges, as marks."

As a brand, even. That's a theme in his next exhibition in Oxford, which looks at William Morris and Andy Warhol. Post-Turner, Deller is a brand himself these days. Who knows? Maybe Richard Benyon will want to buy his portrait.

"I don't think so. To be honest I don't know who would buy a painting like this."

Jeremy Deller's show opens at the Modern Institute, Osborne Street, Glasgow, this evening and continues until October 25

www.themoderninstitute.com