You Imagine What You Desire is an illuminated text piece that 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.’

As comparison between Shaw’s text and the artist’s redacted version of it reveals, Coley has drawn out an ambiguity that interrupts the flow from desire to imagination to creation. In Coley’s text we can equally read that the objects of our desire are imaginary, as we can that imagination itself is desire-driven. In both cases, we are given pause for thought about the extent to which we construct our world.

The declarative tone of You Imagine What You Desire echoes that of other text works by the artist, notably A Place Beyond Belief (2012), Heaven Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens (2008), Burn the Village, Feel the Warmth (2013) and the iconic There Will Be No Miracles Here (2006). This latter artwork was among the works that Coley showed in his Turner Prize exhibition (2007). All these, despite the specific sources and resonances of the texts themselves, invite us to consider how language functions not just to point to things or name them, but also to create and delimit the contexts in which meaning is made.

You Imagine What You Desire was originally exhibited in Jupiter Artland’s Steadings Gallery before being permanently re-sited within the landscape of the Artland.

‘I don’t really want the sculpture to be fixed by words – I want it to be fixed by the image. I am torn over the solidity of language and the fluidity of the visual image.’ Nathan Coley

Biography

Nathan Coley (b.1967, Scotland) investigates the social aspects of our built environment, working across a diverse range of media including public and gallery-based sculpture, photography, drawing, and video. Interested in public space, the artist explores how architecture comes to be invested – and reinvested – with meaning, and how through the competing practices of place these claims and significations come into conflict. His work questions how we relate to public spaces and architecture, driven by research questions centring around the social aspects of our built environment and the communities and individuals who occupy it.

Coley was born, lives and works in Glasgow. The artist graduated from Glasgow School of Art (1989) with a BA in Fine Art. Solo exhibitions of Coley’s work have been held at Parafin London (2017); Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany (2013); Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam (2011); The National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2009); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea (2008) and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2004). In 2007 Coley was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize award. His work is represented in many international public and private collections.