Nathan Coley – You Imagine What You Desire, 2014

Nathan Coley’s works investigate the social and political impact of architecture and public space, and their influence on people’s behaviour and ways of thinking. Whether in installations, light sculptures, photography or video, Coley sees his artistic work as a means of establishing communication between a site and an audience: “Objects can speak in my absence”, he says. Nathan Coley’s work invites the viewer to reflect on, and engage with, issues of identity, ownership and belief.

Mounted on scaffolding, Nathan Coley’s illuminated signs consist of words taken from a variety of contexts, including extracts from historical texts, popular songs and snatches of conversation. Nathan Coley’s declarative sentence repurposes a fragment from a quotation by George Bernard Shaw (“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”). The artist has drawn out an ambiguity. We can equally well read that the objects of our desire are imaginary as we can that imagination itself is desire-driven. Recontextualised in an exhibition space, the sentence also reflects the viewer’s freedom to interpret the works that surround them.