Tarsh Bates

Biography

I am a transdisciplinary artist/researcher/educator born in Mununjali/Beaudesert, Yugambeh/Queensland. I grew up in Matamata, Aotearoa/New Zealand and lived for 35 years in Perth, Whadjuk Nyungar Boodja/South-Western Australia. I have worked as a pizza delivery driver, a fruit and vegetable stacker, an academic tutor and lecturer, a toilet-paper packer, a compost researcher, a honeybee ejaculator, a specialist literacy tutor, a gallery invigilator, a raspberry picker, a workshop designer and facilitator, an editor, a seamstress, a bookkeeper, a curator, a car detailer, and a life drawing model. I have a MSc and PhD in Biological Art and am the UmArts Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Design and Molecular Biology, Umeå University, Ubmeje/Umeå, Sápmi/northern Sweden where I explore olfaction as queer interspecies communication and ecological memory. I am enamoured with Candida albicans.

Solo Exhibitions

2024
SoS UN World Environment Day with Australian Dialogues and EcoArtSpace

Scents of Solastalgia live distillations, collaboration with Susan Hauri-Downing, Linda Knight and Nien Schwarz

2015
The unsettling eros of contact zones, and other stories

Gallery Central, Perth

Group Exhibitions

2025
Resonance Dialogues in Art & Ecology

Painted Tree Gallery & Southern Forest Arts, Northcliffe, Western Australia

2025
Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology

Scents of Asilomar, collaboration with Devon Ward

2024
Hurricanes & Scaffolding: Swedish Research Council Symposium on Artistic Research

There’s no future in ice, collaboration with Susan Hauri-Downing

2020
Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology

Crossing Kingdoms, collaboration with Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, University of Pittsburgh, USA, https://www.artsworkintheageofbiotechnology.org/crossing-kingdoms/

2018
Unhallowed Arts

Surface Dynamics of Adhesion, Resurrected, PICA

2018
This Mess We're In

Curator, 26 queer and first nations artists working with biosciences, Old Customs House, Perth

2016
Femel_Fission

The Tangled Field: After McClintock, The Block, QUT, Brisbane

Commissions

2016
The Tangled Field: After McClintock

Residencies

2025
SPACED: Circular Economies & Beverley Station Arts

with Susan Hauri-Downing. A research-led artistic residency archiving smellscapes in Beverley, a rural farming community in Western Australia.

2025
Centre of Volatile Ecologies, University of Cophenhagen

extraction and identification of lichen volatiles

2024
Air, Sea and Soil, The Museum of Loss and Renewal

Orkney Island

2018
Engineering Life, The UK Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology, and the French Lab of Syn Bio and Microbial Biotech, The University of Edinburgh

a research residency in which I learnt synthetic biology methods for modifying yeast to produce odorants from non-yeast origins

2016
Annette Möte lab, Biofilmzentrum, Deutsches Hertzzentrum Berlin

Candida albicans artistic research

2013
Field_Notes-Deep Time, Finnish Society of Bioart

a group residency exploring the deep time of rock art in the Arctic