In a famous passage in TS Eliot's The Hollow Men the poet writes, "Between the conception /And the creation /Between the emotion /And the response /Falls the Shadow".

The refrain "falls the shadow" may be an apt starting point when approaching the paintings of Liz Coats. She is a painter who creates a situation in colour on a canvas and then another and then intervenes to further heighten this situation, almost as if exploring the shadow that exists between the conception and the creation. Her paintings appear to grow organically and intellectually until a certain surface tension is achieved and the work is abandoned and deemed finished.

Coats, initially trained in New Zealand, has been exhibiting for about 40 years. This is the first survey exhibition of her work and has been assembled by the ANU Drill Hall curator Tony Oates. Coats speaks of a defining moment in her practice, when she was working in 1975 as an archaeologist and was presented with a metre square of darkened earth to excavate. She recalls, "scraping away the soil one centimetre at a time and recording findings on a gridded sheet of paper, I found the hands-on physical labour and systematic approach intensively satisfying".

In her early paintings, including Chameleon 8, 1977, and the Kore series, 1980, the quality of the grid is apparent with colour applied with very small brushstrokes in gridded formations. The works are non-figurative with a constant building up of layers in fine almost transparent hues which partially submerge the layers underneath, creating unexpected manifestations in colour. If a field archaeologist gradually exposes fragments of the history of the earlier occupation of the site, Coats as a painter builds up these manipulated fields of complex colour that may reflect her moods, sensations and responses to her surrounding environment.

Coats creates very personal paintings, and while the grid was a dominant structure for the earlier paintings, in the Soundings, Fisherwoman and Cicadas series of the 1980s and early 1990s, she introduces a greater kinetic element into the practice. The brushstrokes are larger and frequently the palette becomes more subdued. Sometimes she works on unprimed linen, allowing the paint to soak in from both sides, and on other occasions, including the Streaming series and Second Nature paintings, Coats employs a screen-printed image as the base on which to pursue her colour explorations.

While walking through the exhibition reveals a great consistency in her preoccupation with colour, there is also considerable change and development. If the earlier paintings feature something that could be termed the archaeology of colour – the layering of mood and observation – the more recent paintings are concerned with the optic, spiritual and emotional properties of colour.

Coats as an artist has learnt from many artists – the New Zealand, Australian, Russian and American modernists and colour artists – however, over the years, she has developed her own personal and idiosyncratic language in colour painting. Coats has created a personal immersive colour vision.