Artist's Statement

Currently based and practicing in the Clarence Valley region of NSW, Patrick Oates has developed a rich and evocative body of work marrying contemporary landscape with enigmatic figurative form.

Oates paints figures and landscapes that never quite reveal whether they are emerging or disappearing. With an innate curiosity and an experimental approach to paint, he translates internal landscapes onto canvas, exploring inherited stories, queer identity and thought-provoking escapism. The work returns to familiar people he never met, places he can’t quite claim, and the gap between what gets passed down and what gets imagined around it.

The same air and light hold every painting regardless of subject. A single world emerges across the work, built from rural landscapes, family folklore and personal observation rather than any fixed place. Small anomalies recur; light behaving strangely, colour belonging to a feeling rather than observation, following no logic but feeling slightly inevitable. The work asks what we carry, what we come from, and where we belong, then refuses to answer. That refusal is the point.