Nelson’s Elixirs of Truth and Beauty consist of a pair of black boxes each containing a small phial of liquid prepared from dust swept from the floor of Mike Nelson’s huge installation The Imposter, shown in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. (Nelson’s artwork was the reconstruction of a ‘fake’ Turkish building transplanted from Istanbul to the ‘fake’ palazzo of the British Pavilion in the famous Floating City).

These objects are not about Nelson’s work though they are derived from it, and they are not about Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn though they refer to it. They are the carefully packaged material fragments of a real construction whose truth was an illusion. Suspended in distilled water they form an essence of the experience of something sublime. The dust has not been analysed but it was taken in the faith that it contains minute particles of both the thing being experienced and the people experiencing it.

The idea that ‘significant contact’ with a person or a thing might create a potency that can be preserved is not new. It is a principle of sympathetic magic present in many cultures that the qualities of one thing can be transferred to another by consumption and in some communities, often those in which faith plays a significant part, that the dust found in sacred places is itself sacred.

These elixirs then require a suspension of disbelief not unlike the faith in creation inherent in Keats’ idea of Negative Capability – that a great thinker is ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ For Keats “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’ – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’, the inflexion being that they are one and the same. Nelson’s elixirs of Truth and Beauty however remain distinct, although they are made from the same material, as if each might deliver the perfection promised. But here the narrative stops.

Inside the lid of each box is an image taken from a 19th century engraving by WM Millar borrowed in turn from a painting by Turner entitled Wreck off Hastings. In the box entitled Truth the fly papers carry an excerpt from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work of fiction; those inside the box called Beauty carry a very similar piece from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, a faithful record of events.