People have such a predilection for systems, Fyodor Dostoevsky once observed, that they are ready to distort the truth and deny their senses for the sake of the logic that they have imposed. This is the sort of logic that the artist Simon Patterson makes us question. Fascinated by the information with which we order our lives, he fiddles about with our maps and chronologies. He plays with alternatives that expose fresh possibilities. He resets the compass by which we navigate.

Patterson was born in Surrey in 1967 and grew up in the Goldsmiths art-college gang. He took part in the now famous Freeze and Sensation shows and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1996. Yet his work is not brazen or blood-drenched or dramatic. So prepare to recalibrate your expectations as you visit The Undersea World and Other Stories, opening tomorrow at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

This show, as Patterson sees it, is like an anthology: a little introduction to his work. It presents a selection of a dozen or so pieces from across his career. The spectator starts with the artist's 1992 signature work, The Great Bear, a London Underground map in which the names of the stations have been replaced with those of philosophers, film stars and assorted celebrities, from comedy stars through artists to saints.

The spectator can plot his journey from Captain Cook to Pope Leo X via Pythagoras and Immanuel Kant. Patterson invites us to revel in the ridiculous incongruities - but at the same time to consider alternative paths of knowledge that somehow add up to far more than the mere sum of their parts.

From there he travels via a slide rule that recasts conventional time scales, a kite that explores the decay of Man into myth, cosmic wallpaper that sets the constellations in the context of the rock group Deep Purple, to his most recent piece.

Cousteau in the Underworld was commissioned by the National Maritime Museum, whose contemporary art curator was intrigued by an artist who, throughout his career, has referred to nautical knowledge. The outlines of the reefs and the sandbanks, the gullies and outcrops of the ocean floor are all presented in plans which (to the land-dweller, at least) present a fascinating picture of the globe in negative. The continents are empty masses. The sea bed seethes with shoals of minutely written figures.

Into this strictly factual framework Patterson incorporates less empirical memories and imaginations. The stories of Greek mythology get tangled up with the depth soundings and, on top of that, each map refers to a different part of the life story of the once incredibly famous French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. By referring back to a time when television audiences explored the undersea world through the camera of Cousteau, Patterson recasts our outlook. He asks us to remember, for instance, how for those first great seafarers, the Ancient Greeks, it was myths and not mathematics that made sense of the world.

And he wants us to think about the way that myths are made. As you peer at the minute texts, as you would pore over a map, you will find that the information on Cousteau is littered with contradictory inaccuracies. Together the maps may build up into a picture of this oceanographer - like the many fragments that make up a person. But as you piece them together they don't quite fit. Patterson plays with the slippage that happens between history and biography, the constantly shifting processes of emphasis and loss that slowly make up our myths.

The work can look so simple: a sail with a name printed on it, a box kite tied to a ceiling, a giant abacus. It is so easy to pass it by. But if you pause you can be carried off on an oddly alternative trajectory.

Clues bob about like loose buoys upon conceptual expanses. But the work is emphatically not a code to be cracked. It's not about confusing or perplexing the spectator. It's about setting the mind free. You drift about making accidental connections. You wander amid fragments of memories. And slowly you start to discover a fresh sense of your place in the world.

And wasn't that, after all, how all the great explorers first did it? Think of Christopher Columbus. “For the execution of the voyage to the Indies,” he said, “I did not make use of intelligence or mathematics or maps.”

Simon Patterson: The Undersea World and Other Stories opens at the National Maritime Museum, London SE10 (0870 7803380; www.nmm.ac.uk), tomorrow

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