Erin Coates, the Pact. Image 1
Erin Coates, the Pact. Image 3
Erin Coates, the Pact. Image 2
Erin Coates, the Pact. Image 4

Erin COATES, The Pact, 2017, Single channel HD video with sound, 7:20 minutes, artist’s proof.

Purchased for Boola Katitjin 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and Moore Contemporary.

  Boola Katitjin - Level 2, Breezeway (on rotation)

Erin COATES

Born 1977, Albany, Western Australia

Lives and works Fremantle, Western Australia

 

Erin Coates is a Perth-based visual artist and creative producer working across drawing, sculpture and film. Coates’ practice is informed by her deep interest in the natural world, biology, science fiction and genre film cultures. Her practice focuses on the limits of our bodies and physical interaction with and within given environments. In exploring bodily thresholds, she draws from her own background in rock climbing and freediving.

The Pact explores themes of physical endurance, female empowerment and the bond between Erin Coates and her long-time friend, collaborator and fellow rock-climber, Shevaun Cooley. The artwork’s narrative is set inside a dark space of indeterminable dimensions; the scale, movement and orientation of which are defined by the bodies of two climbers trapped within it. Together the two female subjects engage in choreographed movements of muscular might as muscles flex and strain while undergoing various rock-climbing manoeuvres. It is a pact because the subjects need each other. In a greater sense, this artwork is about relationships and how we are interdependent, needing and giving support in turn.