Bush coat was first exhibited in Wells's exhibition of the same name at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in 2020. The work shows the richly patterned carpets from Aotearoa's parliament buildings, layered with speckled moss-covered rock from a farm in Southland—a palette that is often unexpectedly similar.
This work was made during Wells's time as the artist in residence at the Rita Angus Cottage in central Wellington. During this residency, he was given a tour of the parliamentary buildings, and was struck by the carpets and soft furnishings, which, he later found out, were manufactured in Australia, as New Zealand no longer had the processes in place to make them.
At the exhibition at Enjoy, this video sat within a constellation of other woollen objects and references, though which Wells unpicked New Zealand's woolly nationalist rhetoric and pointed to the entrenched political and economic power structures that the fibre is beholden to.
