One to Watch: Nathan Coley

If you haven’t heard of Nathan Coley before now, you’ll know all about him by the end of 2004. The 36-year old Glaswegian already has an impressive track record but this summer’s solo show at the Fruitmarket Gallery is set to make him a household name.

“The Fruitmarket will have a lot of work which has never been shown in the UK before,” says Coley, who is also working on a special commission for the exhibition. He promises to make a cardboard scale model of each of the 300 places of worship listed in Edinburgh’s Yellow Pages. “Fundamentally they’re places where people gather,” says Coley, “and I’m gathering them together. So it’ll be the first time that the Central Mosque will sit right beside a synagogue and all of the different factions of the Church of Scotland will be closer than they probably want to be!”

Coley was unoffical artist in residence at the Lockerbie trial, and his replica of the witness box was included in last year’s big exhibition, Days Like These, at Tate Britain. “That’s going to be a big part of the Fruitmarket show,” says Coley, “as the witness box is coming back to the political seat of power in Scotland.”

Two days after the opening, Coley will leap on a plane to the Sydney Biennale, where he is has been invited to exhibit just along the harbour from the Opera House. “The site is this rather genteel post-imperial botanical gardens,” says Coley. “I’m reintroducing a piece of modernist architecture which was designed in the 1950s but never built, so I’m making a kind of ghost of something which never was.”

And that’s not all. In 2004 Coley’s project Show Home will tour in England and Ireland, his Lockerbie drawings will go to New York, and Coley will travel to Israel to make a film for the Cooper Gallery in Dundee. He is definitely one to watch.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 04.01.04