A cloister and tomb illuminated by stained glass and festooned with profane relics. In the guidebook the owner wrote that he had discovered the remains when digging the foundations of his new house: in medieval times he explained, this had been the hermitage of a monk…

“What an admirable picture to show the vanity & mockery of all human expectation… Oh what a falling off do these ruins present – the subject becomes too gloomy to be persued – the pen drops from my almost palsied hand.”

So wrote Sir John Soane during one of his spurts of rage in the summer of 1812. He imagined that after his death an antiquarian, upon entering his house and interpreting a series of ruined fragments, might try to determine the purpose of the building. A temple to Jupiter, the residence of a magician, or the well in which the vestal virgins were buried alive. In reality Soane saw it as the retreat of a persecuted artist who “from a pure love of Art… raised a wasps nest about him sufficient to sting the strongest man to death”.

Colin Parker's artwork is a reinterpretation of Sir John Soane’s fiction. It uses what is normally an everyday and somewhat mundane space as the stage set for an unresolved dialogue between fragility and permanence, imminent ruin and ruin temporarily suspended. It is a physical epitaph reminding us of the permanence of impermanence, and offers the viewer a fond glimpse of a fictional life’s work and the memories embedded in it.

Colin Parker lives and works in Edinburgh. He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art and now holds a part-time lecturer position there. Recent exhibitions include Slingshot to Megaton Bomb at Castlefield Gallery Manchester (2006), Unpacking my Library at The University of Flensburg in Germany (2006) and shows at both The Arches and Intermedia Gallery in Glasgow (2005). Recently he has been awarded a residency at Hospitalfield House by the Royal Scottish Academy.