COADY’s paintings are bold, psychologically charged compositions. Working at scale and with visceral urgency, she constructs her surfaces through layering, gestural mark-making, and moments of deliberate rupture. Her works pulse with emotional tension. Scratched texts, smeared pigments, and scorched fields of colour operate less as imagery and more as excavation, revealing strata of memory, contradiction, and compulsion.

From early in her practice, COADY has employed fragmented composition and abstract figuration to evoke the unstable terrain of the inner world. A sense of fracture runs through her work—bodies disassemble, words distort, forms hover between presence and erasure. Texture is essential. Her canvases carry the weight of their making—worked, reworked, scraped back, and layered again, until what emerges feels resolved and exposed.

Recurring motifs—ghostly figures, anatomical fragments, flashes of gold—surface and recede like thoughts half-formed or instincts suppressed. Sentences repeat with compulsive insistence, a banal instruction slipping into mania.

Gold colour is a constant—sometimes radiant and exposed, other times buried beneath oil and pigment, visible only at the edges. Raised in Singapore, COADY was steeped in the gilded surfaces of Southeast Asian visual culture—shrines, lacquerware, ceremonial objects—where gold is a symbol of both reverence and transcendence. That early visual language imprinted itself onto her work, resurfacing across canvases not just as embellishment, but as material memory. Whether luminous or concealed, gold in COADY’s paintings becomes a quiet insistence—of the sacred within the fractured.

More recently, COADY has begun to incorporate her pill sculptures directly into her painting compositions—fusing the serenity and symmetry of her sculptural vocabulary with the raw immediacy of her painted surfaces. In doing so, she collapses the boundaries between her two modes of making, allowing them to coexist within a single psychological architecture. These embedded sculptural forms act as anchors or interruptions—moments of clarity within chaos, structure within storm—visualising the tension between suppression and expression, order and unraveling.

Her visual language is deliberately unstable, oscillating between elegance and collapse, control and surrender. If her sculptures speak in the language of calm and containment, her paintings rage and tremble. Together, and now often within the same frame, they reflect the deeper tensions her work inhabits: between coherence and fragmentation, performance and interiority, serenity and volatility.

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