If you've spent any time walking around Newtown, Enmore, Redfern or Paddington, there's a fair chance you've stepped right past a Will Coles and never known it. A grey TV remote glued to a wall with the word HATE cut into it. A squashed soft drink can on a kerb that says ETERNITY. A pair of gloves left on a ledge near Erskineville Oval with GONE on them. They look like rubbish until you get close, and then you realise somebody cast the thing in cement, carved a word into it and stuck it there on purpose, usually in the middle of the night.
This page is my go at pulling together what's actually been written about him: where he came from, how he makes them, what the words are about, where they turn up around Sydney, the gallery shows, and why so many of them don't last. He's a living artist, so I've stuck to what he and others have said in print and left his private life alone.
Who Is Will Coles?
On his own website Will Coles calls himself a "Sculptor, street artist and freelance European". He's English by birth. The German public-art register Kunst@SH says he was born in 1972 in Warwickshire and grew up in Suffolk, and that he spent several years at the Ravensbourne, Wimbledon and Glasgow schools of art before moving to Sydney in the early 1990s.
In a 2013 interview with the Sydney street art blog 2095 he described growing up "in a countryside outside a small village in England: very green & very quiet". He hated sport, liked reading, and said he spent a lot of his time in books. He's said he has "always sculpted", and the biggest influence on him was his grandfather, who he called "a sculptor of incredible skill".
That grandfather comes up again in a 2019 comment Will left on the Differentville blog. A reader asked if he was the grandson of the sculptor Norman Sillman, who'd made a bust of her mother in London in 1951. He wrote back that yes, he was, that his grandfather had died a few years earlier, and that he was "very good at bronze-look plaster".
He wasn't always a sculptor on the street. He told UP Magazine in 2025 that he did graffiti between 1989 and 1991, but admitted, "I was pretty basic, I'm colorblind, and I've always had a more three-dimensional mind." It was in Sydney that he worked out the style he's known for now. He also told UP Magazine he has never used a fake name: "I never hide from anyone or anything, so I'm not going to hide behind a fake name… yet."
Sydney Years and the Move to Europe
Sydney was his base for about twenty years. Honi Soit, the University of Sydney student paper, said in 2024 that he came to Sydney "sometime in the 1990s" and lived here until 2015. Helen Foster at Differentville also says he moved to Europe in 2015 and has since been gluing his work around Valencia, Barcelona, London and towns in Germany. Kunst@SH says he now lives and works in Valencia, Spain, and he told a reader in 2019 that he was "based in Spain these days".
How he's described depends on who's writing. The Sydney Morning Herald called him "an Australian-British artist" in 2023, and the Hamburg galleries that showed him in October 2026 called him an Australian sculptor and street artist.
How He Makes Them
The process is simpler than you'd think, and he's happy to explain it. He told the 2095 blog in 2013:
"I find the right object by: stumbling upon it, searching for it or occasionally I seem to will it in to existence (ie. it turns up in the road outside my studio and it's just what I was looking for). I then make a rubber mould then a plaster cast, carve in letters, then make a second rubber mould from that, then cast it in cement. Those are the small ones which I've done thousands of by now."
So the word isn't carved into each piece one at a time. It's carved once into the plaster, and the second mould carries it into every cement copy. That's how one design can show up all over the place. He told UP Magazine that each design is made in small editions, so "the same sculpture can turn up in ten different countries".
Why Cement?
He explained the choice of material in a 2012 interview with the Melbourne blog The Fitzroy Flasher. His grandfather taught him to cast in cement, which he called "a 'poor man's bronze'":
"It seems to be the natural choice for an urban setting. Resins & plastics seem too slick, too corporate, bronze reeks of officialdom & council-inflicted art. Cement is the same as the buildings, roads & pavements. It ages, discolours & grows old with its surroundings, if you let it."
He said he uses a harder French cement, ciment fondu, and that it's still "cheap & fast" enough to turn out fifty or more small pieces at a time. He also had a tip for anyone trying it: don't use quick-set cement, because "it's fragile salt-ridden junk".
The pieces are glued down, and the glue matters. The Herald said in 2023 that good glue is vital, because people keep trying to prise his work off. His website line about himself, quoted by both the Herald and Differentville, is that he "loves his wife, carbohydrates and strong adhesives".
Not everything is small concrete. His website lists a piece called Freedom made of glass-reinforced plastic with a gold leaf finish, and ArtsHub showed a resin sculpture, property (old), from his 2013 Brenda May Gallery show.
The Objects and the Words
He gave UP Magazine his own list: "TVs, remote controls, armchairs, cell phones, suitcases, washing machines, boomboxes, gloves, guns, dolls, teddy bears, shoes, handbags, jackets…". Honi Soit added balaclavas, guns with bent barrels, AK-47s, skull plaques and dead birds. The Herald says the best known are the "grimacing squashed balaclava-clad faces", along with skulls, mobile phones and sleeping birds. Differentville's list also has bent-barrelled guns, squashed cans, goon bags, the odd teddy bear or baby, and plaques reading WILL COLES WAS 'ERE.
The word is the point. He told The Fitzroy Flasher:
"My ideas grow out of messages, or are really messages condensed down to a word on an object. I try to create a metaphor by turning a common easily recognised item into a meaning by adding a word, hopefully the right word. Sometimes I find the object & it'll sit there bugging me for a year or more, other times it just clicks."
Some of the words that have been written down by people who found them:
- FINITE – the full-size washing machine outside Newtown police station (Honi Soit; Jonathan Shaw's blog).
- ETERNITY – on squashed soft drink cans. Jonathan Shaw noted it was done in Arthur Stace's script.
- HATE and FEAR – on TV remotes and mobile phones in Newtown (Wikipedia; Jonathan Shaw).
- FORGOTTEN – on cast shoes, including one on a pedestrian island in Enmore (Jonathan Shaw; Honi Soit).
- GONE – on gloves near Erskineville Oval (Honi Soit).
- FAKE – on a Louis Vuitton-style handbag at Oxford Street and Greens Road, Paddington (Differentville; Honi Soit).
- NOTHINGNESS – on a dead bird near Redfern station (Differentville).
- LIFE IS FLEETING and OBSOLESCENCE – on two full-size concrete TVs sitting on concrete VCRs, one on King Street and one on Gladstone Street, Enmore (Wikipedia).
- DRINK TO GET DRUNK – on a cast wine cask bladder at Edinburgh and Victoria roads (a reader's comment on Jonathan Shaw's blog).
- Titled pieces Jonathan Shaw found around Enmore and Marrickville: Man-Made, Sweet Tooth (a donut baring its teeth), Work, Laissez Faire and Tag.
I like the ETERNITY cans. They're a nod to Arthur Stace, who chalked that one word on Sydney's footpaths for decades, so a throwaway can ends up carrying the city's most famous bit of street writing. I've done a page on Stace too, linked at the bottom.
What He's Getting At
Consumerism and waste come up again and again. In 2012 he told The Fitzroy Flasher that capitalism "requires each product to have a shorter shelf life than the last, either by built in obsolescence… or by peer pressure (iPhone, say no more!)", and that "any logical reading of this makes you realise this is impossible on a finite planet with finite resources." Seen that way, FINITE on a washing machine and OBSOLESCENCE on a TV make sense.
In 2025 he gave UP Magazine the short version: "To make people think." He went on: "We're bombarded with thousands of ads, signs, and symbols telling us what to do, what to buy. I just want people to think more."
War and guns are the other big theme. ArtsHub said his 2013 Brenda May Gallery show "interrogates consumerism and war with a good dose of wit". His website has pieces called Police Special, ANZAC II (RSL), MAD AK and Hand gun, each with a short and pointed note.
He's named his influences as his grandfather, Rodin, the book Subway Art and the Scottish poet-sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay, who also carved words into stone. In 2025 he added Francis Bacon, Hannah Höch, Lushsux, Futura and Martha Rosler.
Where to Find Them in Sydney
Most people who write about him leave the exact spots out, and the Herald said in 2023 that the locations are "best kept secret". He told the 2095 blog that he does it both ways: some go in really obvious places where loads of people see them, and some are hidden in the hope they'll last longer. The Inner West and the inner east are his heartland, and these are the areas named in print:
- Newtown – the FINITE washing machine outside the police station, which the Herald calls "now-removed". Honi Soit's writer found a yellow cube on its platform two years later. There's also a wall of skulls and balaclavas on Gladstone Street by the railway, an oil can and gloves at the crossing outside Newtown station, and the LIFE IS FLEETING TV on King Street.
- Enmore – Enmore Road bus stops, the OBSOLESCENCE TV on Gladstone Street, a balaclava on a graffiti wall in Trafalgar Street, and Laissez Faire on the mural wall at Phillip and Gladstone streets.
- Paddington – around the old COFA art school (now UNSW Art & Design) at Oxford Street and Greens Road: the FAKE handbag, a balaclava, a skull, and a washing machine on Selwyn Street that has since gone.
- Redfern – Little Eveleigh Street beside the railway. Helen Foster once counted six pieces in about 100 feet there.
- Erskineville – gloves around Erskineville Oval and the small park at Ashmore Street and Mitchell Road.
- Waterloo – a few on Danks Street, the old gallery strip, including a teddy bear.
- The CBD – a balaclava and gloves at Liverpool and Castlereagh streets, a plaque, gun and remote in Dungate Lane, and a balaclava on a transformer box opposite a Commonwealth Bank branch. A Differentville reader also mentioned one on Macquarie Street near the Cahill Walk stairs.
- Marrickville, St Peters, Alexandria and Surry Hills – scattered pieces, including a street plaque near the Brett Whiteley Studio and squashed cans by bus stops in St Peters.
- Further out – one balaclava on Cockatoo Island, gloves left outside the Art Gallery of NSW, a balaclava and two phones in Cessnock in the Hunter, and a balaclava found in Gadigal Reserve, Summer Hill, in September 2026, all reported by Differentville and its readers.
Beyond Sydney
Melbourne got him early. The Fitzroy Flasher wrote in 2012 about waking up to a Fitzroy that had been "bombed" with his pieces. On that trip he said he glued "about five milk crates of new & old works mostly over Brunswick, Fitzroy & the CBD". He liked it there, saying Melbourne's old bluestone lanes suited his work better: "Melbourne seems more natural for my work, like European cities it's older." In 2017 he said there were still a fair few left in Melbourne, and even in Canberra.
Since 2015 he's been working mostly in Europe. He's put pieces from London's South Bank Centre up through Brick Lane, and Differentville reports Valencia, Barcelona and German towns. Hamburg has taken to him in a big way. Kunst@SH says he did a long artist residency there in 2018, and the Urbanshit Gallery says he has been leaving his mark on the city since 2016. One of his best-known Hamburg pieces is Besinnungslosigkeit (roughly "senselessness" or "unconsciousness") on the Moorweide parkland. It's a cast of a discarded liqueur bottle with a stag's head on the label, and the words "produced & bottled to keep you numb".
.jpg)
.jpg)
Galleries, Shows and Prizes
Even though he's made his name on the street, he has shown in galleries. In Sydney his gallery was Brenda May Gallery at 2 Danks Street, Waterloo.
- March 2012 – Nihilist Archaeology, Brenda May Gallery, part of Art Month Sydney. He gave an artist talk on Saturday 10 March, there was an Art at Night event where he ran a cocktail bar, and the show ran until 24 March.
- March 2012 – Hello Dollies, Penrith Regional Gallery, a group show with Fiona Fenech and Janet Parker-Smith.
- October 2013 – Death Wish, Brenda May Gallery, covered by ArtsHub and the Street Fashion Sydney blog. Asked how he got a car into the gallery, he told ArtsHub: "On its side."
- 2 to 18 October 2026 – WAIT | YOUR TURN, a joint show by the Oberfett and Urbanshit galleries at Urbanshit Gallery, Hamburg-Ottensen. Oberfett has worked with him for about ten years. The galleries say he calls his current approach "Degenerated Art".
On prizes, he was blunt in 2012: "I've been shortlisted for loads of art prizes but have never won once." I couldn't find a fetched source naming the shortlists, so I've left them out. He told the same interviewer that one art magazine refused to review his shows, even though it had bought a large sculpture of his for its foyer.
The galleries say his work is in many private and public collections.
Stolen, Defaced and Removed
These pieces are put up without permission. Honi Soit calls him "a guerilla artist, leaving his unsolicited works to be found by anyone and everyone". In his advice to young street artists in 2025, he listed the "unwritten rules", ending with "above all, don't get caught."
I couldn't find any source saying a Sydney council has taken a stand on his pieces in particular. What's on record is the City of Sydney's general line on graffiti: a council spokesperson quoted on Wikipedia said its approach is "to remove graffiti quickly and consistently". In the Hamburg caption for Besinnungslosigkeit he said: "Sometimes a council will embrace a sculpture of mine because they think it's official but will then remove it when they realise it isn't. On rare occasions like this they'll keep it even when they find out its unofficial."
He has his own gripes with councils too. He told The Fitzroy Flasher in 2012 that the City of Sydney's laneway art used "council-commissioned graphic designers & gallery rep'd artists in search of some cred" rather than real street artists. In 2025 he described most new murals as "bland, pretty, meaningless legal wallpaper commissioned by city councils".
More often, the people who take his pieces away are collectors. Jonathan Shaw, an Enmore blogger, wrote in 2013 that "the main damage to his work seems to come from would-be collectors and other street artists". He found Man-Made at an Enmore Road bus stop where "a would-be collector was defeated by the glue and left us with a relic". The FINITE washing machine had been tagged and painted over by another street artist. In 2015 Shaw wrote about a FORGOTTEN shoe on the pedestrian island outside his house. All that was left was a shoeprint, and he wrote that the sculpture "is now a prized – and prised – possession of a private art collector". Differentville says Coles tags himself on Instagram as the "most stolen artist".
He takes it in his stride. He told the 2095 blog his works are "like little children but also orphans, once they are done and then glued down or sold". Shaw notes that Coles, in a video interview, calls the damage part of the game.
Hunting and Collecting
For a lot of Sydneysiders, finding one is half the fun. He told the 2095 blog that people turn it into a treasure hunt: "If people know there are 10 remote control sculptures and they've seen 9, they will keep looking and others will give them clues." Honi Soit's writer called it "a kind of little treasure hunt to inject more colour into my university life". Helen Foster wrote that once you've seen one, every kerb looks different.
If you'd like to find some, the clues are out there. Differentville keeps a list and a map, and readers still add sightings in the comments. His Instagram, @mrwillcoles, gives hints about new spots. Please don't try to lever one off. They're meant to stay where he put them for everyone walking past, and they're glued down hard enough that people usually just break them.
If you want one of your own, buy it from him or a gallery that sells his work. Brenda May in Waterloo showed him in Sydney, and Oberfett and Urbanshit in Hamburg show him now.
Where He Fits in Sydney Street Art
Sydney's street art is mostly paint: the big Newtown murals like the 1991 Martin Luther King mural on King Street, stencils, paste-ups and tags. Wikipedia's article on Newtown street art lists "concrete graffiti" as its own style, "objects cast in concrete or a similar material, which are often glued into place on a footpath or against a wall", and says many of them around Newtown "appear to have been created by the same artist, Will Coles".
He calls himself a sculptor first. He told the 2095 blog: "I'm a sculptor, just to sum up that I am an artist that works in 3D. Everything else is labels." He put his work in a line of "art for the people" that "goes back beyond graff, beyond Social Realism, beyond Hogarth". Jonathan Shaw thought his works were "probably seen and enjoyed by more people on a daily basis than those of any other sculptor". The Herald put him first on its 2023 list of Sydney's best everyday street art, ahead of Thierry Noir, Fintan Magee and Tracey Emin's little birds in the CBD.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Timeline
- 1972 – Born in Warwickshire, England, and raised in Suffolk (Kunst@SH).
- 1989–1991 – Does graffiti, by his own account (UP Magazine).
- Before the early 1990s – Studies at the Ravensbourne, Wimbledon and Glasgow schools of art (Kunst@SH).
- Early 1990s – Moves to Sydney. Honi Soit just says "sometime in the 1990s".
- July 2007 – The Nosey in Newtown blog runs a post headed "Fear, hate, dumb and will", which Wikipedia cites for his Newtown pieces.
- 2011 – Cast remote HATE photographed in Newtown (Wikimedia Commons).
- March 2012 – Nihilist Archaeology at Brenda May Gallery, Waterloo, for Art Month Sydney, and the group show Hello Dollies at Penrith Regional Gallery.
- 2012 – Big gluing trip to Fitzroy, Brunswick and the Melbourne CBD. Interviewed by The Fitzroy Flasher in October.
- May 2013 – Interviewed by the 2095 street art blog.
- October 2013 – Death Wish at Brenda May Gallery, covered by ArtsHub.
- December 2013 – Jonathan Shaw photographs damaged pieces around Enmore, Newtown, Marrickville and Surry Hills.
- 2015 – Moves to Europe (Honi Soit and Differentville). In March, a FORGOTTEN shoe is taken from a pedestrian island in Enmore.
- 2016 – Starts working in Hamburg, according to the Urbanshit Gallery.
- 2018 – Artist residency in Hamburg. Besinnungslosigkeit is installed on the Moorweide.
- 2023 – The Sydney Morning Herald puts him first on its list of Sydney's best everyday street art.
- August 2024 – Honi Soit runs "Sculptures by the Streets". The Newtown washing machine has gone.
- December 2025 – Interviewed by UP Magazine.
- 2–18 October 2026 – WAIT | YOUR TURN at Urbanshit Gallery, Hamburg, with Oberfett.
Where the Sources Disagree
- When he came to Sydney. Kunst@SH says the early 1990s. Honi Soit only says "sometime in the 1990s".
- When he left. Honi Soit and Differentville both say 2015. The Sydney Morning Herald said in June 2023 that he lived in Sydney "until about a decade ago", which would put it a bit earlier.
- Australian, British or European? The Herald says Australian-British, the Hamburg galleries say Australian, Kunst@SH says born in England, and his own website says "freelance European".
- Hamburg dates. The Urbanshit Gallery says he's been working in Hamburg since 2016. Kunst@SH puts his residency in 2018, and Commons dates Besinnungslosigkeit to 2018.
- Was the Hamburg bottle official? A Commons photo description says the piece was funded by Hamburg's culture authority (Kulturbehörde) through a "streetart" project. In Coles's own words, quoted on Street Art Cities, it's one he installed "with a great accomplice" that the council kept "even when they find out its unofficial".
- Plaster or concrete? Commons photographers called the Newtown pieces "plaster graffiti objects". He says the finished pieces are cast in cement, using plaster only for the master copy.
My Earlier Posts
Sources
- Will Coles, official website (willcoles.com). https://www.willcoles.com/
- Adrian Naracita, "Sculptures by the Streets: the art of Will Coles", Honi Soit, 7 August 2024. https://honisoit.com/2024/08/sculptures-by-the-streets-the-art-of-will-coles/
- Diego López, "Will Coles: Street Art as an Act of Thinking", UP Magazine, 2 December 2025. https://upmag.com/will-coles/
- janie2095, "5 Questions with... Will Coles", 2095 Street Art blog, 31 May 2013. http://2095-streetart.blogspot.com/2013/05/5-questions-withwill-coles.html
- "'Ciment Fondu' and faggy delicacies" (interview with Will Coles), The Fitzroy Flasher blog, 6 October 2012. http://thefitzroyflasher.blogspot.com/2012_10_06_archive.html
- Gina Fairley, "This is not a death wish: Will Coles", ArtsHub, 29 October 2013. https://www.artshub.com.au/news/news/this-is-not-a-death-wish-will-coles-197154-2311867/
- Lenny Ann Low, "Where to find Sydney's best everyday street art", Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 2023. https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/where-to-find-sydney-s-best-everyday-street-art-20230623-p5dix0.html
- Helen Foster, "Where to Find Will Coles' Cool Concrete Street Art in Sydney", Differentville (2017, updated 2026, with comments). https://differentville.com/will-coles-sydney-street-art/
- Jonathan Shaw, "Will Coles", Me fail? I fly!, 4 December 2013. https://shawjonathan.com/2013/12/04/will-coles/
- Jonathan Shaw, "Art theft in Enmore", Me fail? I fly!, 10 March 2015. https://shawjonathan.com/2015/03/10/art-theft-in-enmore/
- "Newtown area graffiti and street art", Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtown_area_graffiti_and_street_art
- Brenda May Gallery blog, March 2012. http://brendamaygallery.blogspot.com/
- Sydney Art Galleries and Art Community, Art Month Sydney 2012 listings. https://sydneyartgalleriesandartcommunity.wordpress.com/tag/sydney-galleries/page/15/
- Kent Johnson, "Will Coles 'casts' Death Wish 2013 at Brenda May Gallery", Street Fashion Sydney, 24 October 2013. https://streetfashionsydney.blogspot.com/2013/10/will-coles-casts-death-wish-2013-at.html
- Jan Petersen, "Will Coles: Besinnungslosigkeit", Kunst@SH. https://sh-kunst.de/will-coles-besinnungslosigkeit/
- "Besinnungslosigkeit (Unconsciousness) by Will Coles", Street Art Cities. https://streetartcities.com/markers/8ae49756-4775-4581-bb34-af2c4b252c6c
- "WILL COLES – WAIT | YOUR TURN", Urbanshit Gallery, Hamburg. https://www.urbanshit-gallery.com/de/will-coles-wait-your-turn/
- "WAIT | YOUR TURN – Skulpturen aus Beton von Will Coles", Hamburg Tourismus. https://www.hamburg-tourism.de/sehen-erleben/veranstaltungen/veranstaltungskalender/wait-your-turn-skulpturen-aus-beton-von-will-coles/
- Images: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each picture.