HOLDING PATTERNS:   Recent Work by Liz Coats

Bridie Lonie
Art New Zealand, Number 98 / Autumn 2001-09-24

The images Liz Coats produces may be seen simply as beautifully constructed paintings or slices of deliquescent glass. They are also densely argued propositions about the nature of visual experience and the ways in which we read imagery. Coats tends to be spoken of as someone whose interests lie with an abstraction based on beauty, natural phenomena and pattern, and feminist investigations of space. An area less investigated, though she writes of it herself, is her engagement with theories of symmetry.

Across the Tasman she is regarded as a significant figure in the development of Australian abstraction from the 1970s onward. Here she is something of an enigma, relatively unknown but scarcely emergent. She returned to New Zealand 18 months ago; since then she has exhibited Shifting Geometries at the Sarjeant Art Gallery, Meeting Lines at the Otago Polytechnic Foyer Gallery (with Margaret Roberts), and taken part in The Numbers Game: Creative connections between art and mathematics at the Adam Art Gallery and in Door to Door: selected artists explore the concepts and connotations of the door at the Fisher Gallery.

In Australia, she pursued an extraordinarily consistent approach to abstraction, painting in an exploratory but formalistic way throughout the periods of the dematerialisation of the object, feminist insistences upon explicit narrative and postmodern concerns with the languages of art. Throughout this, Coats insisted upon a close concern with the relationships between paint media and two-dimensional surfaces, the meeting of brush and canvas, the particularities of optical engagement, the structures of symmetry and the harmonics of colour. Feminist understandings of the presymbolic were explored through the delicate intricacies of her compositions and her practice's capacity to respond to changes in the contexts and conditions surrounding it. The internal objects of her imagery, grasped through their slow unfolding in comprehension, can be related to the idea of the transitional object as something that mediates world and understanding.

During residencies in Tokyo and Beijing, Coats explored Asian understandings of chance and contingency in the making of art. Relatively schematic compositional strategies are used to engage and demonstrate the operations of specific aspects of media, location and the artist's mark on the particular day. Grids, networks and surface structures contain the indexical traces of local conditions relating to the artist and her environments.

Theories around object relations, when applied to art, tend to suggest that the art object operates metaphorically; it may be imbued with meaning, but its 'real'-ness functions as a signifier within broader meaning systems. Asian art, tantric art, art concerned with deixis as much as with representation, has always made other claims. Reading the work through the sequence of its making, for instance, engages the reader of the work more precisely with the actions of the maker, adding a specifically mimetic element to the situation. Coats's practice works in two directions, both containing the moment and investigating how the perceived object itself may tune perception through the sequential unravelling of the image's construction.

Coats contends that visual experience is in itself explicitly linked to cognitive experience. At a primary level we know this is so. At a cultural level such ideas seem excessive: the artwork operates within a system of understanding, and of itself is important, but does it have the agency such an interest would claim for it? What is a sustained contemplation of these works supposed to do?