Erin Coates

We’re always touching underwater

Erin Coates
2023, 7:31 minutes, video with sound

Assistant Divers Jasper Silver, Yvonne Doherty, Neil Aldum
Composer Alice Humphries
Percussionist & Performer Louise Devenish
Recording Engineer Alistair McLean
Additional Electronics Michael Terren
Audio Recording funded by the Australian Research Council

This work was filmed in Walyalup waters over a series of dives as the seasons changed and the ocean turned cold. It captures small, very close up moments with slow intimacy – drifting over a tiny field of luminous green macroalgae or peering into a knot of foraging catfish. It also registers profound and ominous transformations; ecological change, the passing of human life and the drift of time.

The syrupy slow vision of submerged ecologies is interrupted by an uncanny presence; at first the flash of a human finger, and then a hand, deathly pale and unnaturally articulated. The serene benthic scenes are accompanied by a delicate score of vibraphonic tones, before a low breathiness and sliding bass sounds sink into the sonic texture. As the film progresses, the marine fauna becomes uncomfortable in its strange familiarity and the relationship it has to human bodies; fleshy sponge-like growths, flowing hairs, oozing lumps and nippled sacs. There is an almost predatory quality to the hand and its digits as it prods at various oceanic lifeforms. The hand-without-a-body and fleshy faunal protrusions are seemingly of the sea and yet disturbingly foreign.

We’re always touching underwater uses the established horror trope of ‘the body in pieces’ to examine environmental anxiety and the nature of loss. It continues my use of corporeal fragmentation and the oceanic gothic as a means of grappling with notions of mortality and ecological collapse. As we gain increasing access to underwater imagery via remote-controlled deep-sea vessels, we are also made aware of the peril these ecosystems are in and the growing threat of under-ocean mining. This work brings dark absurdity to the benthic zone and a transgressive aesthetic to our ceaseless urge for access to this space. The strangeness of marine creatures becomes almost fetishistic in We’re always touching underwater, as these lifeforms become detached parts of an unknowable whole and filled with intimations of desire and horror. ~ Erin Coates ~ Erin Coates

Commissioned by the City of Fremantle for the exhibition Walyalup Waters at PSAS, curated by Yvonne Doherty.

Dr Louise Devenish is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE200100555) funded by the Australian Government

Filmed on unceded Noongar land in Walyalup waters

No animals were harmed in the making of this film