Ash Coates
Ash Coates is a multi-disciplinary artist. His practice
involves, but is not limited to, painting, animation/video, installation and digital art. Across these mediums the artist conjures environmental and scientific narratives, while gleaning reference materials from the landscape, personal events, mythology and science fiction\horror films.
Often using tropes and metaphors from a broad range of sources, Ash’s work has a tendency to explore weird biological and social phenomena. He has a distinct aesthetic that straddles traditional and non-traditional techniques and he uses these to create worlds that blur the line between what is natural and what is unnatural.
Ash has completed a bachelor’s degree with Honours in visual art and has exhibited widely. His animations have been screened at various galleries and festivals, including the Adelaide Festival Centre, Kofu City International Art Festival (Japan), University of Mary Washington (USA), Willoughby Art Biennale, Gertrude Projection Festival and more.
In 2019, he was selected for the Rio Tinto’s, Martin Hansen Memorial Art Prize and was the recipient of both the Crow Street Creative Award and the People’s Choice Award. In 2018 he won the Eureka Art Prize and in 2017 he was selected for the Rio Tinto’s, Martin Hansen Memorial Art Prize and won the CQ University Award. He also received the Ballarat Arts Foundation’s Project Assistants Grant, the People’s Choice Award at the ANL Maritime Art Awards and residencies with WASPS studios in Edinburgh and Fife Scotland and also with AIRY Kofu in Kofu City Japan.
He is currently living and working in Melbourne, Australia and has a studio at Schoolhouse Studios Collingwood.
Artist’s statement
Current movements in science, mysticism and ecology lead to tangents within my work that crossover from the realms of realism to fantasy as a means of exploring the fluidity of our identity and existence within a fluctuating landscape of cultural change at a cellular and microscopic level. My work draws from images of both real and imaginary places, to examine relationships between micro and macro worlds and the language, forms and networks that exist within our biosphere.
The languages and symbiotic relationships of plants, fungi and bacteria cultures, give rise to transformations of microorganisms, energy fluctuations, transmigration of cells and the distribution of nutrients within the environment and our bodies. It is these processes that influence and form the shapes, composition and psychedelic tones within my work. The paintings are a process of ritual and meditation on things both massive and microscopic, magic and scientific, internal and external.
Using a broad range of contrasting mediums, I aim to examine and create dialog in regards to the boundaries of what is natural and what is artificial within the environment and the point where science meets science fiction. I also aim to create metaphors for larger social and philosophical discussion on the topic of the unseen within our environment and our bodies.
Within my animations, the digital and handmade worlds of image making meet in a collision of pixels, molecules and cosmic energy to create a dialog regarding identity, our place within our environment and the impact of a technologically developing world on the way we interact and communicate within the environment. You stand as a voyeur overseeing the processes of the life and death of cells and the language of plants taking on visual forms. The unseen becomes visible and it allows time for contemplation on what it means to be a part of this complex and symbiotic network of cells and microorganisms.