Building sights: Nathan Coley’s theatres of conflict

Conflict lies at the heart of Glasgow-born artist Nathan Coley's stunning Brighton Festival show at the genteel Regency Town House in Hove. The 2007 Turner Prize nominee's exhibition is entitled Portraits of Dissension and features sculptures of buildings which are synonymous with ideological struggle.

Most notable is local landmark the Grand Hotel, which was bombed by the IRA during the 1984 Tory Party Conference when Margaret Thatcher and members of the Cabinet were staying there.

Nathan Coley

Cast in bronze, the recreation of the cavity the bomb left in the facade of the Grand Hotel is suitably monumental

As Coley points out, no memorial or civic monument exists to remember the five people who died that night. His work, Roy Walsh meets Patrick McGee (2015) partly fills that void.

Cast in bronze, the recreation of the cavity the bomb left in the facade of the hotel is suitably monumental. The title refers to Patrick Magee who stayed at the hotel under the pseudonym Roy Walsh and planted the bomb under the bath in his room.

Upstairs in the Regency House is a large sculpture called Paul (2015). It's a cabinet of curiosities constructed inside the body of St Paul's Cathedral, London.

Here the dissension is the breakdown of understanding between the anti-capitalist Occupy London protesters who camped outside the Cathedral (having moved from their original target, the nearby London Stock Exchange) and the Cathedral's administration. This resulted in a violent eviction rather than the hoped-for dialogue.

Meanwhile, across the city in Brighton's oldest building, St Nicholas Church, Coley was impressed when Father Robert Chavner offered space for an earlier work of his. The text sculpture You Imagine What You Desire (2014) places a quotation from noted atheist George Bernard Shaw in a holy place.

Appropriately for Coley and his stimulating show, the Shaw quotation ends: "You will what you imagine and at last you create what you will".