I was having a cigarette outside a gallery opening some years back when I spotted my first Will Coles piece. No, it wasn’t in the gallery itself – it was stuck up high on a bit of guttering, glued in place –  I’d only noticed it as I’d been half drunkenly staring up into space. To be honest, at the time I had no idea what the fuck it was (some kind of concrete gun stuck to the wall?) but it piqued my interest enough to mention it to someone, who told me all about him, and therein began my  love for his work …

Will Coles sculptural “street art installations” surreptitiously blend in with the cities surroundings. Often, unless you’re really looking for them, you just wont see them – and it is this subtlety to his work that makes me believe his work to be amongst some of the finest examples of Street art in the world.

Downpipes, awnings, concrete slabs – sometimes covertly place but very often, so overtly gifted to the street that one wonders if it is deliberately placed or just a “natural” part of the urban environment.

This is the inherent beauty behind his pieces – the harsh reality of our concrete laden world made manifest with attitudinal pisstaking and poetry, consumer goods laden with solidity and non-functioning precision – replicas of reality, twisted into new forms of surreal visages and repetitiously cast, often antagonistic urban icons.

We had the chance to shoot a few questions off to Will about his work just before his show, and what we got back was absolutely superb. You might notice that we’ve done this one a little differently – Will was a pretty busy dude the past few weeks, so he hand wrote out the answers to our interview questions. Given Wills raw expositions of his work out on the streets, we thought it only fitting to post this one up just as raw, and put it up exactly as he gave it to us!

Read on for a grand insight into the mans work! Click the images if you need a bigger version, or check out the PDFs of the pages below … many thanks Will, Melbourne definitely fucking loves you too.

Check out Will Coles website, as well as the Dark Horse Experiment website for more info on the show – its on until the 29th March in Melbourne.

Interview photos courtesy of Dean Sunshine – who also helped facilitate this rad interview with Will. Check out all of Deans photos from Will Coles opening at Dark Horse Experiment, as well as Will Coles in action during his visit to Melbourne here.

Also, check out even more photos that David Russell got for us from the opening of Will Coles show here.