Inside the Studio // Paul Uhlmann on Rachel Coad's Time

Perhaps, it could be argued that there is nothing more elusive and constructed than the concept of time. Thinking about and working with time is the preoccupation informing the new body of work currently on show at Art Collective WA by renowned and celebrated Western Australian artist Rachel Coad.

For the philosopher Henri Bergson, time could be understood in two main ways. There is clock time, which dominates our hyper-consumerist lives and reduces our worth and activities to measurable units of commodity.  In many ways, in order to be useful to this form of measurement we become mechanised clocks. However, there is also duration, the flow of continuity of a life within the lived body. Our very existence, through our cells, bones and nerves, carries collected memories, feelings and experiences. Within our bodies duration represents the true value of time and to comprehend its existential significance we need only to recall an intense experience and dwell on the fullness of the sensations to understand that time is not to be measured by clocks but rather lived to the full in the here and now.

Rachel’s work acts as a vehicle to enable us to contemplate duration and presents as a series of paintings of monochrome heads and a nostalgic painting of a young woman with her first car. These are not paintings of photographs. They are something else. They are paintings which appear to carry the physiognomy of the photograph, with its attendant history of bearing witness but evolve slowly through layered patient painting process which follows its own painting logic. At times there are small pools of oil paint congealing on the surface of the face with colouring that is at odds with the flesh of the subject. This creates a tension between the world of shadows of appearances and the imagination and opens our curiosity to entertain questions of reality and history.

One is reminded for example, of the Sunday visit to the grandmother and picking up the family album, only to have several photographs dislodge themselves and flutter to the floor. On picking them up, there is the materiality of the photograph, perhaps the date stamp from the processor, the tactility of the paper, fading chemicals, all of which collectively speak to the archive of the period that these individuals hail from. Within Rachel's portraits, the echo of family members is especially evident in recurring features such as the nose, which reappears across several canvases as faces move between youth and old age, and across genders. So, in many ways the effect is that each successive painting recalls the other, to set up new relations between individuals. Just as generations of family will often share without knowing it, genetic mannerisms, habits, interests and features.

For me, Rachel’s work also recalls the work of Sir Francis Galton who invented composite photographs in the 1880s, which involved photographing multiple faces, one over the other, on a glass negative plate. The resulting image was a collection of all the assembled features to create one composite face. Galton experimented with this technique with criminals attempting to find the common features of a criminal type and frighteningly, he took his ideas further as the founder of eugenics which had entirely sinister intentions and outcomes.

There are no sinister intentions here in the work of Rachel Coad, rather she mines her childhood experiences for her material. Collective memories are pooled in her geographic childhood home of Lake Grace; generations of memories are recalled from this location which inform and stimulate her creative endeavors. The date 1977 is key to her project in terms of her two graphic novels or long comics as she calls them. Her grandmother, also an artist, passed away in 1977 and this foundational date is explored imaginatively through her graphic form of magic realism which generously encompasses songs and punk bands of the period. In reading these books one is invited to pause and superimpose the music to accompany the story. This makes these works – rather like the landscape at Lake Grace –  multi-layered and expansive. These two books are published by Upswell Press by Terri Ann White. This press has been prolific ever since Terri Ann ventured into her own publishing enterprise several years ago and is one of Perth’s cultural jewels which goes out into the world.

Despite a long and successful career, one has the feeling that Rachel has only just begun and that the gestation of a rich imaginative childhood in Lake Grace promises an abundant harvest in the years ahead. However, right now with her painting series Time and two graphic novels, we have a strong contribution to the creative potential of memory as a shared cultural experience.

Paul Uhlmann, July 2026

Foley, M. (2013). Life lessons from Bergson. Pan Macmillan.

Francis Galton and composite portraiture. (n.d.). Galton.org. https://galton.org/composite.htm

Phipps, J.-F. (2005). Henri Bergson and the perception of time. Philosophy Now, (48). https://philosophynow.org/issues/48/Henri_Bergson_and_the_Perception_of_Time

Upswell Publishing. (n.d.). All products – page 3. https://upswellpublishing.com/collections/all?page=3