Dylan Coates London, United Kingdom

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I am a London based artist working primarily within the realms of moving image and video installation, while also exploring painting, sound, and photographs. My work is often highly personal and semi-autobiographical, holding context of memory, narrative and its relationship to visual grammar and film language while exploring themes reflecting the sensitivity and darkness of the human psyche.

I primarily create work within film and moving image installation, often using multiple projections/screens to subvert audiences expectations of what a 'film' can be. My video work usually combines many different mediums and formats of film such as 8mm, VHS, 35mm photographs, digital video, and soundscapes created by myself. I use this amalgamation of visual art forms to create abstract narratives, often feeling more like a visual collage/diary/poem than a linear short film. This moving image work often explores very personal and semi-autobiographical themes of fragmented memory, loneliness, and the overall vulnerability of the human state in a pure form. My stream-of-consciousness, highly personal multi-projection installation piece 'House On Fire' has been shown at AMP Gallery, London and Bury Art Museum & Sculpture centre, Manchester, as well as winning The Next Thing Moving Image award for 2022.

I also experiment with painting, using visceral, thick brush strokes and a very specific colour palette to create other-worldly compositions in a gestural and brash style. Figures and shapes find themselves scratched into the work, not directly a part of these worlds but living on top of them as if they are toilet-wall defacements. I often paint using a mixture of oil and acrylic, directly onto rough wooden surfaces before using knives and other sharp objects to mark out figures and landscapes in the work, and then painting over to repeat the process. My painting work often works as a first stepping stone to my video installation work; beginning exploration of ideas that will further be expanded upon in the context of a bigger piece of work.

Outside of my personal practice I also work as part of a video and creative direction duo with my partner Travis Barton, taking on music video and fashion promo commissions for clients such as Domino, September Records, PIAS, Young, Radd Lounge, and many more. This commission work can be found via my Instagram and website.