Programme 5: Nathan Coley – Project based artwork

Background Information

After graduating, Nathan stayed in Glasgow and became involved with artist-led activity, including the Windfall exhibition in Glasgow, 1991. He has continued to build on his career, exhibiting at home and abroad. He moved to Dundee in 1998 with his girlfriend and works from a studio at home and elsewhere.

Nathan continues to be inspired by architecture. He relates to it because it is the medium that communities and groups of people use to illustrate themselves. He believes you can understand the values and beliefs of people through the architecture they create. He was commissioned by Stills gallery in Edinburgh to create an artwork to mark the launch of their new building in 1998. He produced an artist’s book called ‘Urban Sanctuary’, a collection of conversations with artists and architects exploring the possibility that the architectural space of the sanctuary really exists in the mind of the reader.

Gerhard Richter is one Nathan’s favourite artists. He is also one of the most internationally well-known German artists alive today. Richter creates paintings from his own photographs. One of Nathan’s favourite pictures is called ‘Betty’, and shows Richter’s daughter looking away from the viewer towards a painting (one of Richter’s). Nathan likes this work because of the intimacy created from painting a family photo. Nathan is able to connect with the painting because he has an empathy with the origins of the image and the process Richter went through to create this visually complex and emotionally evocative work.

Nathan is inspired by the sculptor Robert Smithson, whose complex ideas took root in many forms: drawings, projects and proposals, sculpture, earthworks, films and critical writings. Smithson's provocative and seminal works, made in the mid-sixties to early seventies, redefined the language of sculpture. He was one of the founders of the art form known as ‘earthworks’ or ‘land art’ – he literally went out of the city and into the desert to make art. He is most well known for the ‘Spiral Jetty’ (1970), located in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He also enjoys the work of his contemporaries, especially Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’ (1993) and Jeremy Deller’s ‘Acid Brass’ (1997).

Nathan works in a variety of different materials and mediums. He has been a digital animator, a sculptor and a video director. Nathan collaborated with architects Reiach and Hall on the refurbishment of the Stills Gallery in Edinburgh.

He continues to work as the artist in residence at the Lockerbie Trial in Zeist, Holland, from where he is making a project with the Imperial War Museum in London. He is currently working on a new public project in Newcastle called ‘Show Home’. Situated in a redeveloped marina area on the Tyne, the work will resemble a single storey rural cottage, complete with white walls, glass windows and a slate roof. The work questions notions of land use, building style and life style.