Denese Oates is an Australian sculptor who uses metal to create work that is an homage to nature.

Over a number of decades, Oates has developed her own artistic morphology through her slow and painstaking technique. The forces in nature are increasingly allowed to dominate her work as she explores both the forms and spirit of nature.

Having worked with the malleable form of handmade paper in her earlier career, Denese now prefers metal, copper in particular, as her preferred medium to create a dichotomy between the durability of her pieces and the transient and fragile subject matter that she depicts.

In earlier exhibitions, her sculptures were often a mass of intertwined copper vines fashioned into abstracted organic forms, each piece carefully constructed and created with a symmetry of its own. Other works have demonstrated her interest in nature on a minute scale, schematically mapping out human and botanical vascular systems that resembled strange organic forms transplanted from a mysterious landscape.

She has been consistently interested in the forms of nature as a source of inspiration and a springboard for many of her sculptures.