Instead of gravitating towards London like many successful artists from the so-called provinces, Nathan Coley has made it his mission to bring the centre of gravity of the art world a little closer to the centre of Scotland. For several years Coley’s abiding interest has been the examination of our built environment as an expression of our cultural values. Coley’s Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, an installation that filled the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2004, is comprised of beautifully crafted four-foot high cardboard models of sacred buildings in and around Edinburgh [every place of worship listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages], effectively transforming it into a holy city, where the sacred has squeezed out the secular in a synthetic collocation of religious buildings that exerts an uncannily powerful presence. What is immediately obvious here is the eclectic nature of this sacred architecture, ranging from High Gothic, through neo-Classical and Flemish to unadorned Methodist brick-built chapel, each edifice stylistically oblivious of the next. As a reflection upon not only the diversity of religious beliefs extant here, but also on the divergent strands within those diverse religions, this dizzying mass of buildings gives us pause for thought on just how many sub-cultures go to make up what we customarily perceive, on the surface of things, to be a homogeneous culture.

Architectural history as cultural history is the theme that occupies much of Coley’s work, whether that be painstakingly constructed architectural models or more conceptual works such as his monumental, fairground-style illuminated signs, one of which declaimed that There Will Be No Miracles Here, or the verdant green glow of another banner-like sign which enjoined that, We Must Cultivate Our Garden. This latter work relates, of course, to that contemporary branch of architecture, landscape architecture, which grew of classical landscape gardening. This work, shown at The Lighthouse, Scotland’s centre for architecture and design in Glasgow in 2006, and on top of The Herald building in St. Andrew Square, Edinburgh in 2007, stark and mischievously dictatorial in tone, brings a message that is precariously balanced between hope and despair. Hope that the message will be taken up and expressed through acres of burgeoning floriferous glory, or despair through the very fact that the existence of a ruinous overgrown wilderness must have prompted this plea. That this, a simple illuminated sign, could provoke such contrasting mental pictures with their attendant emotional responses is witness to the intensity of feeling that underpins Coley’s work. There are many more possible interpretations of this phrase – first voiced by the French writer Voltaire in his book Candide – it is this possibility of a plethora of interpretational permutations that attracted Coley to this phrase, a pragmatic counter to the Utopian view that ‘Everything in the garden is lovely.’ The concept of garden has many connotations, of course, ranging from that ultimate seat of aspirations, the primeval one in Eden, through the formal classically landscaped one, to the clipped, pruned and groomed suburban patch, and finally to the Garden of Remembrance, that leafy expression of epilogue that rounds off this whole thing called existence.

As another Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay found, words have the power to eclipse all in their vicinity – in his iconic garden, Little Sparta, his poetic words, set in stone, replaced shrubs and perennials, filling it with their multifarious landscape of meanings. Coley has taken up that baton in this series of works, the power of whose phrases belie their apparent simplicity.

In his one-to-fifty scale models of places of worship in Edinburgh, in Lamp of Sacrifice, Turner Prize short-listed artist Coley has imposed a particular orientation on our perception of that city; in his manipulation of its fabric, he has moulded and closed it down in a particularly polarised way. His giant, illuminated textworks, on the other hand, open things out, offering a whole panoply of meanings and existential possibilities, some didactic, some paradoxical, others whimsical. These contrasts in effect are symptomatic of the divergent and wide-angled approaches that Coley has chosen to take in his exploration and analyses of the man-made environment as forensic evidence of our shifting cultural landscape. His diagnosis of our cultural wellbeing offers only subtle and covert prognostic indications, leaving that particular task to the viewer and to commentators on his work. Dialectical rather than dissuasive, the power of his work resides in its ability to access the uncanny, touching us through the transformation of the familiar into something infinitely more compelling and intriguing.