Artist carving out a niche with sculpture of Scots gravestones

In Memory, by the Scottish Turner Prize nominee Nathan Coley, is a "contemplative place" meant to explore the meaning of faith, the artist said yesterday.

Jupiter Artland, on the Bonnington House estate owned by Robert and Nicky Wilson, boasts dramatic sculptures by leading names of British art.

Years in the making, at a cost of millions of pounds, it opened for public tours last year, and will reopen with the new work unveiled for the summer season in mid-May.

Jupiter Artland, as first revealed in The Scotsman last year, ranges from Life Mounds, giant swirling landscape sculptures by Scottish architect Charles Jencks, to Over Here, a huge artificial cobweb by Shane Waltener. The new sculptures are equally startling.

They range from an oak tree's shadow planted out in 6,500 black tulips by the artist Peter Liversidge, to a nine-metre steel sculpture of a gun, inspired by Mr Wilson's 19th-century shotgun, by artist-in-residence Cornelia Parker.

The Scottish artist Jim Lambie is producing one of his trademark psychedelic floors, using multi-coloured fluorescent vinyl tape, as well as a rare outdoor sculpture.

All the headstones in Coley's work are originally from burial plots, but were later replaced or removed and lay disused. They come from stonemasons in central Scotland and include two Jewish and one Muslim gravestone, reflecting the communities in Scotland that bury their dead, Mr Coley said.

The names have been removed out of sensitivity to the families – who were not contacted for permission – but the inscriptions and dates of death remain.

"Removing the names makes an artwork very interesting because it becomes a discussion of the general idea of where we bury our dead rather than a specific person," he said.

Coley's past work has ranged from The Lamp of Sacrifice, featuring scale cardboard models of all 286 places of worship in the Edinburgh Yellow Pages, to Days Like These, a precise replica of the witness box in the Lockerbie bombing trial. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007.

Bonnington House dates back to the 18th century but has no graveyard, unlike many stately homes. "It's something that must have struck Nathan, that there's no sense of death and family belonging," said Ms Wilson. "It's about the conceptual idea of death and memory."

The nine-metre tall sculpture of her husband's gun will lean against a tree, "almost like it's been left there", she said. "It's staggering in scale, but very slim and slender, and has a kind of menace."