Ash Coates Hero

Looking to broad sources of influence such as biology, mythology, object-oriented ontology and sci-fi/horror films as a means to interpret reality, my work is an exploration of things both natural and unnatural, micro and macro, the weird and the unseen.

This work presents a once-impenetrable Hercules, deconstructed and repopulated with electric colours and morphic shapes, just as a tree would be colonised by lichen or fungi.

Plasticity, history, smoke and mystery. Accelerating at an ever-growing rate, toward a state of explosive and cosmic decay, the archetype of the hero is made vulnerable and put to question. The hero becomes a chimera.

Ash Coates, 2022