When con­fron­ted with a Turner Prize nom­in­a­tion, with all the attendant attention, and the prospect of going head to head in com­pet­i­tion with their fellows, some artists shy away. Not so Nathan Coley. ‘I found it quite easy to say yes,’ he says, taking a break from in­stal­ling his work at Tate Liverpool, ‘because it’s an accolade, because some really great artists have been nominated in the past - it’s good to be as­so­ci­ated with that level of work - and, honestly, because it brings a huge audience to my work. And, in terms of the work that I’m making, I feel that it’s a good time to be short­l­is­ted.’

On that last point, Coley is dead right. Not that his recent work has reached a new plateau, or eclipsed his past practice, instead he is at a stage in his career when past pieces and present projects seem to be gelling together, revealing res­on­ances, some sur­pris­ing.

This is apt. Coley’s sculp­tur­al objects and in­stal­l­a­tions are, more often than not, de­cept­ively simple, marked out by a tendency to develop slowly, dis­clos­ing new layers of meaning, long after the viewer first en­coun­ters them.

‘With in­di­vi­du­al pieces of work,’ Coley explains, ‘I neither seek to steal the show, nor am I in­ter­es­ted in one-liners. My intention is for the work to have a number of ideas, a number of re­f­er­ences.’

A good example, both of this deceptive sim­pli­city and the in­creas­ing in­ter­con­nec­tions between his work, could be found at Coley’s recent outing at do­g­ger­fish­er­. Untitled (Threshold Sculpture), a slim beam of wood that blocked the entrance to the gallery, forced visitors to take care in stepping over it on their way into the space. ‘You can look at that work a being just a piece of wood on the floor,’ Coley explains, ‘maybe in the context of min­im­al­ism, but then you start thinking about the whole notion of the space you’re entering and the space you’re leaving, and then, it’s made of oak, which has a par­t­ic­u­lar spiritual history and is, ar­chi­tec­tur­ally, used and loved by Mod­er­n­ists.’

Coley also sees the piece - which formally has little con­nec­tion to works that have gone before - as closely linked to the work which first drew wide attention to his practice, a re­con­struc­tion of the witness box at the Lockerbie trials, made when he was ‘un­of­fi­ci­al artist’ at the Hague: ‘It’s about the control of space, a de­mar­c­a­tion of space, even though there’s no re­sem­b­lance. Both come from my interest in how we show who we are through the ar­chi­tec­ture of our spaces.’

This talk of an innate con­nec­tion between a block of oak and a witness box might make Coley sound like an arch con­cep­tu­al­ist, with little interest in the physical man­i­fest­a­tions of his ideas, but nothing could be further from the truth.

‘It’s a nice con­tra­dic­tion,’ he admits, ‘On the one hand I’m a person who makes objects, but I don’t think of that being the centre of the work. The object is somehow a mechanism to make the idea come to life.’

Indeed, he is close to incensed by re­f­er­ences in the press to his piece We Must Cultivate Our Garden, the last line of Voltaire’s novel Candide il­lu­min­ated and installed atop a building on St. Andrew’s Square in Edinburgh, being made of neon. ‘I took a lot of time and energy not making them neon!’, he says, ‘Neon has a long history in con­tem­por­ary art, but I wanted to find something that had common or folk as­so­ci­a­tions, so the light-bulbs are fair­ground light-bulbs, which means that the gravitas of the text is con­tra­dic­ted by the “circus is coming to town” feel of the piece, so you have one of the masters of the En­light­en­ment meeting the fair­ground and the football pitch.’

That in­stal­l­a­tion, and his best-known work, Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship in Edinburgh - anonymous cardboard sculp­tures of every church listed in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages - point to a trait Coley shares with his fellow nominees, es­pe­ci­ally Mark Wallinger and Zarina Bhimji: an avowedly political bent.

‘Some people see a work like Lamp of Sacrifice as a cel­e­b­ra­tion of faith,’ Coley says, ‘but for me it’s the absolute opposite. With We Must Cultivate Our Garden, that last line has been discussed at great length as being anti-church, anti-royalty and as being a call to arms for self-de­ter­m­in­a­tion. So it’s no accident it’s on St. Andrew’s Square, named after this supposed saint of this supposed religion, Chris­ti­an­ity.’

As for the big question - who will take the Prize? - Coley is sanguine. ‘The short­l­ist­ing is the thing that I’m excited about, not least because I have great respect for the other three who are short­l­is­ted,’ he says, ‘The winning or the losing is a whole other thing, to do with the personal taste of the judges, to do with things that are outwith my control.’

This interview was first published in The Herald on October 12th, 2007.