Correction Pen

“Sometimes a decade arrives when nations have the chance to turn away from bigotry and selfishness and turn to their countrymen and women and embrace them as loved members of the human family. But do we have the ticker for it?”
Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground: Learning to fall in love with your country

The Merino Sheep has been appropriated from the former two dollar note where it was displayed beside John Macarthur (who was a dodgy fuck).
The sheep is painted in ‘white out - correction marker’ its introduction to our lands resulted in the fertile spongy absorbent soils being trodden flat and turned into packed dirt, the wealth of top soil mined beyond recognition.
In a landscape otherwise barren, black and blue, stained with turps smoke, there are streaks of metallic sheen hinting at mineral wealth.
The arc of a rainbow or banner could also be fire.
To see where we are headed we need to have a firm grasp of where we are, the reality of the situation we are in, and also, the trajectory our past has put us on.
This country as Australia began as a penal colony… a correction pen

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Growing up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, Coates often felt a sense of estrangement caused by the inauthenticity of his surroundings. This has become a central theme in his artwork as he sees this cognitive dissonance reflected in the broader social fabric of Australia.

After dropping out of high school, Robert was accepted into art school solely on the merits of his portfolio. But his restless nature and dislike of institutions let him to leave before graduating, setting him on a journey through a plethora of places and communities on the rugged edges of society.

His myriad careers, from being a chef in inner city Sydney, to working as a builder in Western Australia, deep underground in the mines of the Tanami desert or abseiling waterfront high-rises has taken him across the Australian continent several times. Mirroring his working life, Robert’s art has a muscular physicality and urgency surrounding his creations.

His themes deal with his feelings about Australia, it’s history, the immense beauty of it and the sadness that resonates through the land and it’s people. In his work he explores the relationship we have to our surroundings, specifically in relation to his own country, but also more broadly interrogating the interconnectedness of everything with a raw, unforgiving spontaneity.

Robert has exhibited work in Sydney, Perth and Darwin
Most recently in the 2019 Mosman art prize, and in the 2019 Korean-Australian Art Prize.