Giulietta Coates

Coates’ landscape photographs explore the tension between loss and beauty, dread and longing. Her work evokes a nostalgia not for something lost but for what never was, reflecting on the inaccessibility of the grandiose landscapes that surround her. She describes these landscapes as "utterly at a distance," creating a void that feels like a "death space," where connection and intimacy remain forever out of reach. Through intimate “conversations” with individual motifs—rocks, pools of water, wooden stumps—she crafts allegories for our enigmatic relationship with beauty and nature in the face of mortality. For Coates, beauty itself is a reminder of death’s presence, where the creative impulse intertwines with our impermanence.

Recently, Coates has extended her exploration of absence through text works inspired by imagined French film titles, creating storylines that exist only as illusions. These works metaphorically express the gap between our imagined futures and the ecological crises she believes define our reality. Based in the Haut Provence region of France for 14 years, Coates integrates her photography with wooden structures, rejecting traditional labels of "Photographer." Using only smartphone cameras, she embraces their imperfections to respond instinctively to the landscape, capturing moments of anxiety, fear, and melancholy. Her career spans 40 years, with works in collections worldwide and representation by BBA Gallery in Berlin since 2016. She graduated with a Master degree at the royal collage of Art in London.