John Ruskin’s treatise The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1848) opens with The Lamp of Sacrifice in which he extols in characteristic evangelical tone, “It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration: not the gift, but the giving.” In 2000, the centenary year of his death, Ruskin’s assertion that architectural value is conveyed through a process of sacrifice was emulated in an intriguing work The Lamp of Sacrifice: 161 Places of Worship, Birmingham which occurred during as it is, a group exhibition of newly commissioned work at Ikon Gallery. The artist, Nathan Coley, responded to an initial brief which proposed an investigation of the ‘soft city’ - a term coined by writer Jonathan Raban in the 70s. “The soft city”, Raban proposed, “is made of the complex network of human relationships and individual experiences, a city built around the physical and psychological terrains mapped out by its inhabitants.” Coley’s previous work had taken a range of forms, from the loaded proposition of an urban sanctuary in Edinburgh to the visual potency of aerial footage over churches in Münster. As an exhibition which embraced new models of process and presentation, as it is presented Coley with an opportunity to extend the conceptual and physical limits of his practice, whilst also offering the catalyst of Birmingham as a new subject for his analysis of authority and public space. Coley’s response was characteristically ambitious: to construct cardboard models of every place of worship listed in the Central Birmingham issue of the Yellow Pages during the seven weeks of the exhibition. There were 161 listed, which roughly divided into four a day. Working from his makeshift studio in the gallery, every day from 10am to 6pm, Coley remapped Birmingham creating a spiritual cityscape of miniature proportions which grew exponentially over the forty-six days of the exhibition. Found between Pizza Delivery and Planning, the alphabetical list of places of worship in the Yellow Pages acts as a leveller of denominations and renders religion a service like any other. The list was Coley’s ready-made through which project assistants Beth Slater and Mark Wilkinson plotted a course, taking a series of digital photographs from which Coley drew his models to scale. The process yielded churches of varying ostentation sited alongside an elaborate Buddhist Temple of Peace and nondescript Methodist halls, Sikh temples which soared above the terraced houses of mosques and obscure Christian Fellowship groups. Gradually the buildings became expendable ciphers, neutralised through the remaking process and deliberately random juxtaposition. As an aerial representation of Birmingham, once renowned as the city of a thousand trades, the vision of the city’s spiritual diversity became increasingly compelling as the models bled into the adjacent gallery spaces. They begged to be identified and admired, especially by errant members of their congregations. It was Coley’s constant presence in the gallery that short-circuited such a straightforward process of reminiscence, however. To the artist the challenging production process (and before long the demands on him to communicate with visitors) formed the basis of the work itself – the sacrifice. The interpretation of the models merely as sculptural objects was problematised by Coley’s continuing action. Rather, he allowed the visitor’s response to develop from appreciation to inquiry: why, how, for whom, for what? The work thus encouraged a broader engagement with notions of moral value and public space, rather than affirm a notion of Birmingham as ‘melting-pot’. As the completion of the task approached it became clear to Coley that all 161 models should be destroyed following the final day of the exhibition. Only the photographic record of the models exists now as a separate work. The Lamp of Sacrifice: 161 Places of Worship, Birmingham was a process of production, inquiry and interaction. Its transience reflects the fluid and impressionable space of the soft city, which emerges through the network of human communication, adaptation and imagination. From the exhibition catlogue 'As It Is', Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2000