Mini documentary by ART ON THE MOVE
Erin Coates: Transforming Bodies, 2024

Film by Steven Alyian

Article
Southerly Magazine, July 2024

Some of Erin's recent work has centred on the underwater gothic in relation to Australia's unique marine and estuarine ecologies, whilst also examining personal and familial narratives. "My focus on underwater biology stems in part from my childhood experiences growing up around professional shell divers and against the backdrop of the South Coast".

Article
Curator’s Radar, Art Collector Magazine, Mar 2023

Installed within Pier 2/3 as a part of Rīvus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Never the same river twice, 2022 appeared like a great waterfall cascading from the ceiling. … Meticulously constructed from oystershells, hair, porcelain and river pearls, the installation reflected the artist’s experiences of freediving and her firsthand observations of the effects of colonial occupation and land management. Briony Downes

Exhibition catalogue
Bread of Bone, Holmes à Court Gallery, 2023

Using collage, graphite and the aesthetics of body horror, Coates considers the human impacts on the animal world and the foods we might consume in the future. Complex collages emerge as strange life cycles and bizarre ecosystems. … [Ellen McCarthy]

Bread of Bone exhibition review
Seesaw Magazine, April 2023

Bread of Bone is a little gem of an exhibition that elevates the skill of drawing while chewing on the highly charged subject of food. [Craig McKeough]

‘Out of the Dark’ Artist’s Profile
Art Collector Magazine, Sydney Contemporary Issue, Sept 2022

Recently included in rīvus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney and Monster Theatres: 2020 Adelaide Biennial, Coates has been working on a new series of graphite drawings in the chiaroscuro style. The passing of time and the physical limits of human and non-human bodies are key elements of this work, and Coates has represented these themes through intricately detailed depictions of sea life and human bones. … [Briony Downes]

‘Deep waters’
Biennale of Sydney review, March 19, 2022

The oysters have teeth. At first, the shells that encrust the far wall of the century-old wharf shed in Sydney’s Walsh Bay appear benign. But look closer and a serrated surface is sprouting a set of molars. One grows hair. Another, skin. What do we make of these molluscs? And how should they think about us? … [Neha Kale]

23rd Biennale of Sydney: rīvus
Art Asia Pacific May/June Issue 2022

Erin Coates’ works are about the destruction of the oyster reefs that helped filter water in Perth’s Swan River. Her sculpture Metallic Water, a row of suspended bronze dolphin bones, references the heavy metals now present in the aquatic mammals’ bodies. … [Jane O’Sullivan]

‘The Chosen Ones’, Ten Gallery feature
10 Magazine, Spring Summer 2022

Her striking sculptural work, made especialy for the 23rd biennale, has an eco-horror aesthetic, weaving together masses of discarded oyster shells with fleshy silicon objects that look like small body parts and cancerous growths.
… [Anna Davis, curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia]

‘Art, Nature, and the Language of Alluvial Gold’
Resonate Magazine, 2022

To isolate Devenish's performance practice from Coates' visual arts practice, and, further, from James' compositional practice would be to dilute the power of the work. Alluvial Gold is best understood holistically - a remarkable aesthetic achievement that can only have come about by compassionate collaboration.

… the sunken texture of Coates' underwater videography suspends us in time, and lends a viscosity to Devenish's movement as she navigates the performance space. … [Kate Milligan]

‘The View From Here’
Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2021

A short teaser video for the survey show Erin Coates // videos and movies // 2011-2020

‘Perspective from the waves’
Article in See Saw Magazine, Feb 2021

Lidless eyeballs stare out from imagined marine shell cases in Erin Coates’ graphite drawing, Ocular Barnacles (2020), overtly observing us visitors from above the shoreline. Cass Lynch

‘The View From Here’
Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2021
Broadsheet publication

Excerpt from the broadsheet of essay by Laetitia Wilson on Erin Coates’ solo screen survey // videos and movies // 2011-2020

Alluvial Gold exhibition catalogue
Goolugatup Heathcote, 2020

The river is a complex topic for artistic exploration and Coates literally throws her body into it, becoming intimate with its lifeforms and changing ecologies through numerous free-diving expeditions. … The resulting artworks are a far throw from the more familiar artistic scenes of picturesque painterly river views, where painters boast the mastery of their craft in plein air. This is plein eau. It is fluidly expressed across the mediums of graphite, cast silicon, shells, porcelain, bronze, gold, film and sound performance, to become a complex commentary on human/river/creature entanglements. … [Laetitia Wilson]

‘An aquatic adventure’
Seesaw Magazine, Dec 2020

Key to the exhibition’s success is Coates’s incredible ability to conjure depth and layers of complexity in her artworks. This exhibition’s use of materials, shadow and sound makes for a message with a heartbeat you can feel, see and hear. … [Belinda Hermawan]

Art journal article - Artlink, Nov 2020

In this review of the Bodywork exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre Gemma Weston discusses the connection between Coates’ curatorial and arts practices: “Coates is an avid and disciplined rock and urban climber with an encyclopedia knowledge of cinematic body horror, interests that have manifested as artistic projects in various ways, frequently as collaborations with other women. Between these interests is a fascinating interplay between control of the body and its opposites.”

‘Our leisure time under the microscope’
Seesaw Magazine, Nov 2020

“Coates and Abdullah’s works each bring out the force and physicality of the activities portrayed, in ways that undermine the traditionally gendered spaces of their respective sports. Both contain a sense of threat and danger, which made me think about the ways in which we put strain on our bodies in the pursuit of leisure, risking injury and even death for the enjoyment and pleasure of physical achievement. … [Miranda Johnson]

Commentary on Dark Water

By Dr Lisa Slade, Assistant Director of Artistic Programs at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

‘Grotesqueries: Adelaide Biennial 2020’
The Monthly, 2020

A video work by Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari, with drawn and sculpted accompaniments, was particularly creepy and yet deeply moving. I read Dark Water (2019) as another allegory … I will say no more for fear of spoiling the psychological experience for others, but it is wonderful in the literal sense of that word … [Miriam Cosic]

‘Australian artists tap in Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’
ABC Arts, 2020

Dark Water taps into tropes of the monstrous feminine, following a grieving young woman into a watery subterranean zone beneath her house, where her body is transformed or re-birthed … [Dee Jefferson]

‘Dark Water Floods the Mind with Eco, Body and Psychological Horror’ Beat Box Mayhem, 2020

Ahead of the film’s premiere at this week’s Atlanta Horror Film Festival, Coates discusses the inspiration behind her surreal film and the challenges of transformative loss and underwater shooting… [Ismael Abdusalaam]

Interview - VIDEOBRASIL
21st Contemporary Art Biennial | Imagined Communities
SESC, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019-2020

Watch the artist interview + video excerpts.

Biennial Publication
VIDEOBRASIL, SESC, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019-2020

In true road-movie spirit, Coates presents the car as a safe haven that shields us from the calamities going on around us in the places we drive through … [Her] video is a parodical comment on the natural devastation of the modern age and the ways in which we represent it … [Gabriel Bogossian]

Exhibition catalogue - Lust for Lustre
Ellenbrook Art Gallery, Perth, 2020

The pearl has cast a spell upon many throughout history; it is a gem of folklore, it is decadent, sensuous and magical, and yet at the same time, our relationship with it seems problematic. It is this fascination that forms the common thread that connects the artworks in this exhibition … [Gemma Ben-ary]

Exhibition catalogue - Dark Water
Linden New Art, Melbourne, 2019

Our relationship to water, as an island nation, is a complex one, we are lovers of the ocean edge, delighted by our ability to catch a wave and glide back into the safety of the shore. Yet we’re always a little unsure about what lurks below, unseen and unknown. For the collaborating artists in this exhibition, Anna Nazzarri and Erin Coates, the ocean has been a place of both fascination and awe. … [Melinda Martin]

Exhibition publication - Unhallowed Arts
UWA Publishing, 2018

Unhallowed Arts contributes to the legacy of Frankenstein and considers developments in the sciences of the twenty-first century through an eclectic array of visual, performative and written responses. Editors: Laetitia Wilson, Oron Catts and Eugenio Viola. Published on the occasion of the exhibition HyperPrometheus: the Legacy of Frankenstein, at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Exhibition website - The National
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2017

Visit the artist's page on the dedicated website for The National: New Australian Art - a major survey exhibition of contemporary art in Australia and held across the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA).

Interview for online journal - Buildering.net, 2017

Earlier this year, we randomly stumbled upon the existence of Erin Coates whose passion for climbing overlaps extensively into her artwork, as seen in her remarkable film, Thigmotaxis — a term used in biology and behavioural studies to describe a response to the touch of the external surface of an object. ... [Andy Day]

Catalogue for commissioned artwork
Sounding Art by Decibel at PS Art Space, Fremantle, 2017

Coates' video work for Sounding Art, a video work with sound entitled ‘The Pact’ features two bodies, sometimes behind or even obscured by pouring blood. The bodies are climbing in a black space of unknown dimensions, the high production quality of the video provides shimmer and shadow, detailed definition of the climber’s muscular frames with the bottomless depths around them, imbued with rhythmic and structural gesture... [Cat Hope]

Exhibition catalogue - Open Water: The Offering
Firstdraft, Sydney, 2017
&
Moana Project Space, Perth, 2017

Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari's collaborative solo exhibition incorporates underwater video, drawing and scrimshaw to offer a darkly magic realist version of maritime history in regional Australia. It takes as a starting point an incident that occurred in 1965 in the coastal town of Albany when a well-known whaler and gunner on The Cheynes III (a whale chaser) lost his leg after it became entangled in a rope attached to a harpoon fired at a whale.

Online interview
Fremantle Arts Centre, 2017

Read an interview with the artist about her art practice and her role as Special Projects Coordinator for Fremantle Arts Centre.

Art journal article - Artlink, Dec 2016

In her recent video Driving to the Ends of the Earth (2016) the artist Erin Coates does not take the apocalypse so seriously, casually steering through blizzards, fires and storms while feeding herself and her dog from an onboard garden and pantry. For footage of avalanches and aircraft crashes are all too familiar in an era of mass media and YouTube, and for Coates they are not so much a portent of the end times as they are incidents to be navigated one by one. [Darren Jorgensen]

Exhibition review - Artlink, Sept 2016

Success, Fremantle's artist-run contemporary art platform and multi-gallery exhibition venue, has a great vibe. This is due in part to the pragmatics of hosting a gallery in the basement of a defunct department store, where prohibitive electricity costs favour maximal darkness, and where ceiling tiles removed to expose the infrastructural innards allow you to feel, as a friend put it, the weight of the building above you... [Gemma Weston]

Exhibition review - RealTime Arts, Feb-Mar 2016

... the artists of Rumblestrip, a post-apocalyptic amalgamation of brutalist vehicles, ethereal projections and strange objects, created a total outdoor environment, a crowded happening that was also something of a poke in the eye for Perth's flashy new city developments... [Darren Jorgensen]

Online journal article - Runway Experimental Australian Art, 2016

Taking place for one loud, epic night, Rumblestrip occupied a large disused urban lot near the centre of Perth city. Operating equally as an artwork and a party, Rumblestrip was imbued with a riotous end-of-times aesthetic and celebrated the world’s most demographically isolated city. Artwork by eight Australian artists included mobile gardens, a walk-in car cinema, moving micro-architecture, a reclaimed swamp and a girl gang on bikes....[Neil Aldum & Erin Coates]

Publication
Catalyst: the Katherine Hannay Visual Arts Commission, 2015

This book was published on the occasion of this one-off national visual arts commission, awarded to four Australian visual artists.

The connection between buildings, sci-fi and horror fiction may seem like an incongruous one. But for artist Erin Coates, also a rock climber, it’s the ideas that influence the sci-fi and body horror genres that are used to explore her interest in architecture and the built environment. Through a fusion of video, installation, drawing and sculpture, Coates’ work centres on exploring the way a viewer’s body relates to her art. [Lisa Starkey]

Artist monograph - Kinesphere : Erin Coates
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2014

As a part of her major solo show Kinesphere and the national Catalyst Commission, PICA Press and Atomic Activity Books have published a monograph on artist Erin Coates. This 128 page book contains commissioned essays by Jack Sargeant, Dr Shevaun Cooley and Leigh Robb. Limited edition copies include an artwork bolted through the book, a custom cast resin climbing hold. Books for sale at PICA

Exhibition review - Daily Review, Sept 2014

Downstairs at PICA, WA artist Erin Coates has been commissioned to create Kinesphere (a term derived from movement theorist Rudolf Laban, who used it to refer to the personal space accessible by one’s extended limbs). In this case, the show itself is a kind of integrated extension of the artist’s own creative, recreational and conceptual ‘limbs’, including drawing, video, installation, architecture and urban climbing... [Humphrey Bower]

Exhibition review, Artlink, Dec 2014

Kinesphere represented a significant opus by Perth-based Erin Coates, bringing together her study of public space, drawing and cinematography skills, with her ‘other’ career as an intrepid rock climber. A series of wall drawings gave diagrammatic form to Coates’ practice of clambering over well-known public artworks in the lonely pre-dawn hours... [Sheridan Coleman]

Exhibition review - RealTime Arts, Dec-Jan 2014

Over the last few years, Erin Coates and her team have been climbing the public art around Perth as well as apartment blocks, highway retaining walls and supermarket buildings. her exhibition Kinesphere is the culmination of all this effort, showing off bodies as they lunge and tense from one hold to another. A video of their climbs, and some parkour too, is placed inside a seven-metre black monolith that rises in the centre of the gallery. It is a monument to those monuments around the city that Coates has repurposed. ...[Darren Jorgensen]

Exhibition catalogue - The Cars that Ate Perth
Spectrum Project Space, 2013

Against the backdrop of sustainability planning and in the knowledge that car culture must be radically reconceived, the works in this exhibition extend an inquiry into the fabric and phenomenology of
cars, their fascination, their erotics and their psychic hold over us. The show encompasses both devouring and inviting machines, overtones
of road-rage and the “death drive” compulsion, as well as the warm body space of an interior... [Jill Bennett]

Exhibition catalogue - Inside Running
Fremantle Arts Centre, 2013

Coates’ work reflects the technicalities of climbing and the precision and planning required for a successful climb, but also the challenge and the fun of interacting with the landscape (whether it has been formed over millennia or built in the last twenty years) … Incorporating elements of climbing and bouldering, “buildering” or urban climbing brings to the fore knowing the limits of the body and where it is situated and what it can achieve – in essence the phenomenology of being conscious of the self as it moves through its environment… [Ric Spencer]

Screen exhibition catalogue - LOOPS
Felt Space, 2012

Midnight film screenings have almost always been reserved for exploitation, counterculture and B-movies. Perverts, punks and junkies frequenting inner-city dive cinemas to indulge in the crude pleasures of drug induced sex and violence...[James L Marshall, 2012]

Exhibition review - Daily Serving, 2012

Other videos in the collection .. explicitly reference the psychological tension and physical abjection stimulated by the horror genre. Coates’ video ‘Thirst’ features a single panning shot of a mob of zombies staggering through an abandoned gas station at twilight. […] Combined with the setting of the fuel station, a soundtrack featuring gurgling drains and idling motors makes a comment on our societal dependence on oil, while the monotonous gait of the undead seems to suggest the existential horror of a world in stasis… [Thea Costantino]

Screen exhibition catalogue - Suspension
Perth Cultural Centre Screen, 2012

Augmenting human vision and extending normal temporal
perception, the nine short video works in Suspension utilise a range
of screen manipulation techniques to suspend disbelief, holding us
in moments that are wondrous, horrifying, hypnotic and magical... [Erin Coates]

Exhibition review - Art monthly, Sept 2013

Driving to the Centre of the Earth is Erin Coates’ silent, cinema-style video placed at the bottom of a shaft penetrating a wall […] Coates conflates reality with a Jules Vernie style of sci-fi underground travel that straddles boundaries between practical everyday needs, car culture, and the call to live sustainably. [Nien Schwarz]

Exhibition catalogue - Polygraphics
Gallery Centre, 2017

In Polygraphics: Walking the Line, artists express the fallibility of line as a meaningful disseminator of truth. Taking their cue from the polygraph and the phrase “walk the line”, they conceptually and visuallyarticulate line as a human construct that reiterates unfettered, progressive, inhibited or indeterminate readings... [Anna Nazzari]