Patrick Oates

Says Patrick Oates of this work, "An apparition over my local dog beach. Rainbows don’t normally appear after dark.

"When my dog suddenly and unexpectedly became critically ill, my partner and I found ourselves doing things we would never normally do. Building altars, burning palo santo, listening for signs in songs on the radio, prayer, anything. My mum keeping him in her thoughts, my mother-in-law praying for him every night beside her bed, a friend casting a spell. All at the same time. Growing up alongside multiple belief systems and knowing I couldn’t fully belong to any of them, faith had always felt like something that excluded me. It was in that moment of desperation that I saw it differently.

"These paintings sit in that space. A reflection with no source. An orb in the sky. A coral light with nothing to cast it. Each one asks whether the meaning we bring to a thing changes what it is, and whether that even matters."

Oates paints figures and landscapes that never quite reveal whether they are emerging or disappearing. 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.