Southern light

Liz Coats is a senior Australian artist based in Canberra. She has been a prolific painter since the 1970s, using colour and pattern to create intricate paintings that investigate the language of abstraction and the elusive process of how we see.

‘'Southern light' is a contemplative painting with nine parts, in a bold presentation format that rewards with slow viewing,’ Coats wrote in 2022. Each of the work’s panels is organised by an underlying geometry of pentagons that emerge into and recede from focus. Presented in a grid of three-by-three, the work also relates to the ancient Chinese mathematical principle of the Lo-Shu or magic square. The work pivots between this underlying structure and allusions to intangible pulsations of atmospherics and luminosity.

Coats painted 'Southern light' in a light-filled studio in Whanganui on New Zealand’s North Island. Its colours echo the subtle but brilliant hues of clouds and sky, while its complex patterns appear to move and change with prolonged viewing. In her continuing investigation of abstraction, Coats explores the properties of colour and space alongside ‘a wise and passionate attention to human relationships with the land’, as noted by art historian Bridie Lonie in the artist’s monograph. While drawn from the experiences of being immersed in the light, colours and atmospherics of her environment, 'Southern light' also stands as a slowly unfurling meditation on the nature of perception and luminosity.