“You don’t really become an artist — I think you’re born with that urge to create.”
The Gilded Mirror of Modern Life
In a world where contemporary art increasingly critiques the cultural anxieties of our time, Catherine Coady, known professionally as COADY, offers a piercing gaze into the seductive contradictions of modern society. Based in Melbourne, COADY is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Her art presents a compelling investigation into expressions of reverence and fragility, of pursuit of composure, and the aesthetics of medication itself: its patterns, surfaces, and the cultural narratives that surround it. Through her distinctive visual language, she exposes the subtle ways society clings to control while hiding fragility under the sheen of polish.
COADY’s artistic lens is shaped by a life lived across diverse cultures. Her early childhood in Singapore left her with an enduring impression of ritualistic opulence and saturated sensory experiences. Vivid colors, intricate ornamentation, and the symbolic value of gold became embedded in her visual memory. This exposure cultivated a deep fascination with surface and spirituality. Returning to Australia during her early teenage years, COADY found herself immersed in pill-popping culture and the advertising that promised women of the 1970s and 1980s perfection, serenity, the sky itself. This duality of cultures, spirituality versus superficiality, wish for control and surrender — would become the bedrock of her work.
These two influential threads now materialize through her signature use of pill sculptures and rich, layered paintings. For COADY, the pill is more than an object; it is a contemporary icon. It represents the paradox of self-medication as a form of both control and surrender. Her artworks do not simply aestheticize these capsules but interrogate their cultural weight: the pursuit of composure, the numbing of emotion, and the spiritual vacancy in modern solutions. Through installations and series that negotiate the interplay between order and chaos — executed with a distinctly lighthearted sensibility — her practice interrogates not only the mechanisms of consumption, but also the psychological comfort derived from the sterile assurances of synthetic relief.
COADY: Sculpting Satire and Stillness
COADY approaches art as something inherent, not acquired. To her, the drive to create has always existed as an instinctive way of seeing and feeling. The real difficulty lies in maintaining that vision against external expectations and the passage of time. Rather than chasing trends or novelty, she has remained committed to an evolving, deeply personal investigation of material and metaphor. Her current practice centers on sculptural pills and paintings, two modes that allow her to weave emotional complexity into formal precision. The result is work that balances humor and heartbreak, critique and compassion.
Her process is as structured as it is intuitive. Pill sculptures require intense focus and precision, which means they demand entire blocks of her schedule. By contrast, her painting periods allow for greater immediacy and exploration, often becoming fertile ground for new ideas. It is in this ebb and flow — between the carefully orchestrated and the spontaneously sparked — that COADY’s work finds its rhythm. She is not afraid to shift between mediums or to begin something entirely new mid-process if it feels urgent. That adaptability reinforces her belief that art is not about repetition, but about resonance. Each project is a chapter, not a conclusion.
Among her influences, COADY points to Julian Schnabel as a figure of enduring inspiration. Schnabel’s fearless engagement with scale, material, and idea reflects an artistic philosophy she deeply identifies with: the refusal to narrow one’s range of expression. Beyond individual artists, she also draws from societal patterns, emerging technologies, and collective behavior shifts. Her response to these cultural tremors is neither heavy-handed nor purely observational. Instead, she mirrors the emotional texture beneath them — often through irony, sometimes through elegy, always through art that asks us to reconsider what we’ve normalized in the pursuit of perfection.
Memory Burned Into Form
Within COADY’s practice, Give Me a Home Amongst the Gum Trees stands as a profoundly meaningful piece, fusing personal memory with national trauma. Created during one of Australia’s most devastating bushfire seasons, the artwork transforms a familiar childhood refrain into a searing commentary on loss and resilience. Composed of 12 pill sculptures, the installation spells out the chorus of the Australian beloved song from the 70’s, gradually deteriorating into rows of charred capsules. The scorched elements evoke not only physical destruction but the emotional searing of collective memory, embedding environmental crises into a visual metaphor for healing and survival.
This piece is not merely sentimental. It operates as a complex symbol of nostalgia turned tragic, reminding viewers how closely identity and environment are intertwined. By choosing pills as the material for such a charged subject, COADY reinforces the uncomfortable proximity between artificial calm and natural disaster. The pills, typically signifiers of control, here appear powerless against elemental force. It is this tension between containment and collapse that gives the work its haunting power.
Give me a home among the gumtrees
With lots of plum trees
A sheep or two, a k-kangaroo
A clothesline out the back
Verandah out the front
And an old rocking chair
COADY: Obsession, Aesthetics, and the Art of Repetition
COADY’s daily practice is marked by rigor and careful scheduling, particularly due to the technical demands of her pill sculptures. Producing these works involves intricate processes and intense concentration, which necessitates strict division between phases of painting and sculpture. This compartmentalized rhythm allows her to maintain creative clarity while ensuring that each medium receives the full depth of her attention. Within these structured periods, she also remains open to moments of spontaneous creativity, which often seed future body of works. These dual energies — precision and spontaneity — fuel a practice that is at once disciplined and expansive.
Currently, COADY is preparing for a series of international presentations, including an art auction in Saudi Arabia held under the patronage of HRH Princess Noura Al Saud, participation in Art Miami, and two forthcoming solo exhibitions set to debut across Europe in 2026. One of the key bodies of work developed for her forthcoming Paris presentation, Beyond the Surface, unites COADY’s pill sculptures and painted compositions into a cohesive visual language, where form and texture engage in a subtle dialogue. Through this interplay, the works consider how depth can emerge through both illusion and structure, advancing her continued inquiry into control, vulnerability, and the poetics of surface.
Alongside her studio practice, COADY is preparing to release a limited-edition publication charting a decade of her artistic evolution. Conceived in close collaboration with the curator who has accompanied her through these exhibitions, the book unfolds as both an archive and an intimate conversation—offering rare insight into her process, conceptual development, and the shifting language of her work. Rather than serving as a retrospective, it positions itself as a living document: a reflection on where she has been and a gesture toward what lies ahead. For an artist so finely attuned to cycles of control and transformation, this act of looking back is less a pause than a recalibration—a continuation of her ongoing inquiry into art’s ability to bear witness, provoke reflection, and unsettle the familiar.
