About the artwork:
Time and scale become abstracted, as the larger landscape blends with microbes and synthetic matter, woven together in a quantum dance of weird proportions. Underlying processes, networks and languages of life, death, waste, and decay can now be experienced in magnified and time lapsed representations. The weird worlds that exist beneath the surface are revealed in hyperreal renderings, enabling everyday people a portal into a world that was once available only to the elite and enlightened. In my work I present landscapes, but they are just as much external as they are internal. They exist in both places at once, on multiple timelines and parallel dimensions. Things inside things, locality becomes obscured and everything is alive.
About Ash:
Ash Coates is a multi-disciplinary Artist and the creator of the Mycolinguistics animation project. 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 personal events, mythology and science fiction\horror films.
Often using tropes and metaphors, Ash’s work has a tendency and ability to be veiled, while remaining lively and sharp at the same time. He has a distinct aesthetic that straddles traditional and non-traditional techniques and materials.
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.
Last year he was he 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.