Image Credit: Patricia Coates in Berlin Performance Seeds at the Humboldthain Flak Tower, Performance documented by: Johann Lurf

Patricia Coates works in performance, installation, video, and living materials (indigenous trees grown from seed). She subverts established gender roles while revealing our entangled and conflicted relationship with the living world. Themes of entropy, enthalpy, and the absurd recur to disclose a paradox of the human condition: our constructive and destructive selves. Central questions weaving through her work are: How is it that we have poised ourselves to destroy the prospects for decent existence for much of life, and “Does one actually ever become a woman, or is to be a woman a mode of becoming without end?” (Judith Butler). 

In performance, the aging female body is the artist’s artistic medium. The limits of her physical and psychological being are pushed in endurance interventions that challenge traditional boundaries and open up possibilities beyond what we think the body (and art) can be or do. In their extremity, performances become provocative, awakening the viewer to the precariousness of life while revealing the tragedy of the human condition: our irreconcilable capacity for violence, destruction, care and resilience. Performances often appear against dominant scenes of oppression and brokenness, conveying a need for restitution, while not shying away from the grittier corners of the human psyche. The work digs deeper, trying to uncover something about who we are: our blemishes, shortcomings and contradictions. 

Lucy Palustris, the artist’s alter-ego, emerges as the Absurd Hero, pitched between nurture and destruction. Lucy is more Sisyphean than Nightingale, taking on ecological and social crises, countering one form of madness with another. Her body is like an ecosystem, worn like the degraded sites she doggedly repairs. A tragic-comedic tone permeates her tenacious, though quixotic efforts, questioning her ability (and art itself) as a force of resistance. 

Weaving together film, performance, installation seeds and plants, Coates’s examines what it means to be human, unfurling like leaves, our hubris, resilience, and the will to survive. 

The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council support Coates’s international practice. She has two upcoming exhibitions in New York City, working with acclaimed writer David Rimanelli and Director Jose Martos. International residencies include Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto (B.A), Queen's University (B.Ed.) and the University of Windsor (MFA). 

Herbaria at the Thames Gallery has inspired Coates to break new conceptual ground, encouraging a deeper examination of environmental crises within the heart of industrial agriculture, inspiring new work in performance, video and installation. 

“Over the past thirty years, I have been transforming 60-acres in Essex County, Ontario, from industrial agriculture into habitat, cultivating species native to Carolinian forests and wetlands while remaining acutely aware that my resistance against "Big Ag" may be no more than a futile gesture. This earthwork is an ongoing, regenerative work of flux and transformation, inspiring my performances, films and installations—all propelled by the question: How is it that we have poised ourselves to destroy the prospects for a decent existence for much of life? 

In Berlin, I grew trees from seeds collected at sites of trauma (The Wall, Stasi Prison, flak towers, bunkers), planting these in a series of guerrilla performances across the city, mixing memories of a violent past with anxieties over an uncertain future. Performances drew on the history of the Trümmerfrauen (rubble women), evoking endurance and resilience. Against this affirmation, the work suggested an inextricable link between our human capacity for violence and our destructive relationship with the environment. Are we capable of living more sympathetically within the living world and amongst ourselves? Trauma and care emerged as pivotal themes in my work. 

In New York City, my inquiry evolved to examine the question: How is it that we abandon our sick and poor? My persona moved from the fields of Ontario, shovelling earth, to a NYC tenement, shovelling trash. A derelict apartment became a metaphor for a broader sick social body, shedding light on the disparity between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ and the vulnerability of those who fall through the cracks. The abject traffics in uncontrollable anxiety, isolation, suffering and madness, like Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Symptoms of trauma speak to a need for intervention and care. 

From these experiences, I am pleased to return to the Thames Gallery, where I showed my first solo exhibition upon completing my MFA in 2015. Now, my aging female body in performance becomes both the vehicle of artistic expression and the instrument of radical care — a tragicomic figure battling degradation and despair armed with a shovel and seedlings.”