Nathan Coley
Until July 18; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

It’s irresistible. As soon as you see the sprawling city of miniature cardboard churches, crammed together cheek by jowl, you can’t help trying to spot the ones you know. All 286 Places of Worship listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages are here, covering the Lothians, Fife and the Borders. As a result, the hip young regulars at the Fruitmarket Gallery are joined for a couple of months by the hip replacement generation, curious to see how their local church compares with the competition.

Of course, that’s not quite the point. The work is called The Lamp of Sacrifice, a reference to a piece of writing by 19th century artist and critic John Ruskin. Ruskin wrote that good buildings should be labours of love; sacrifices of time, effort and money. Dundee-based artist Nathan Coley – whose solo show this is – has taken on the challenge, laboriously reconstituting 286 buildings in cardboard and glue. They are things of beauty, by virtue of the care and attention lavished on them – Ruskin’s point exactly.

Coley explores our relationship with the built environment in a variety of ways in this show, which spans seven years of prolific output. The artist makes complex themes accessible and entertaining, especially when his work is brought together under one roof. Whether through sculpture, photography, video or slide lecture, Coley shifts the balance of power between people and architecture. Buildings cease to be environments around us, and are revealed as objects of study.

It’s not the fabric of buildings that interests Coley but, in corporate parlance, their added value. The modernist Marks & Spencer building in Manchester was the city’s architectural heart, until an IRA bomb did away with it in 1996. People only then realised how important the structure had been to them. “I Don’t Have Another Land”, it says on the side of Coley’s charred reconstruction of the building. It’s a quote from an Israeli folk song – introducing a whole new set of complexities into an already loaded artwork.

People don’t usually appear directly in Coley’s work, but things do. Particularly when, like the M&S building, they assume a significance beyond their original functions. Coley adopted the role of unofficial court artist at Kamp Zeist in the Netherlands, where the Lockerbie trial took place. He made careful drawings of the evidence presented, enlarging fragments of clothing and hotel receipts so that every tiny detail is reproduced. Incidental things have become central to a question of life and death.

In the centre of the room sits an exact replica of the Kamp Zeist witness box. For the duration of the trial the court room was officially a piece of Scotland in the middle of the Dutch countryside. The witness box is like a raft floating on this sea of legal fiction, its identity further complicated by the fact that it is itself a replica. Beyond it you can see some of those 286 cardboard churches, isolated pockets of sanctuary untethered from their original sites. Somehow, after a while, the institutions we have built around ourselves all seem to start floating away.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 30.05.04