Nathan Coley

Book excerpt: Nathan Coley (*1967 in Glasgow) is interested in the idea of "public" space, and his practice explores the ways in which architecture becomes invested-and reinvested-with meaning. Across a range of media Coley investigates what the built environment reveals about the people it surrounds and how the social and individual response to it is in turn culturally conditioned. Using the readymade as a means to take from and re-place in the world, Coley addresses the ritual forms we use to articulate our beliefs-from hand-held placards and erected signs to religious sanctuaries. Whether highlighting in illuminated letters the testimony of a New Yorker recalling the World Trade Center attacks or erasing the names of the dead from their gravestones, his work frequently turns the specific into the general, thereby testing its function as a form of social representation; simply, does this aphorism, this gravestone, this building, speak on my behalf?