Pigment on rice paper digital prints, 60 × 48 × 9 cm (framed)

This series of crumpled photographic portraits of animals is the result of a destructive and generative process by the artist. He makes high quality archival prints of his wildlife photography and compresses them in his hands as tightly as possible. A deliberately destructive act which is a reaction to the superficiality of image and its inadequacy to fully represent the animal. However, for Coates it's also an attempt to retrieve the lost experience of his initial encounter with that animal by imbuing it with physical form.