Inside-Out Billboard program unveils new public art

Façade Climb is a playful work of ‘trompe-l'œil’, which is an artistic term for a highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. Initially used as a device in painting, in this work Erin Coates has cleverly created a photographic and digital illusion of a continued architectural surface onto the billboard, with two women climbers appearing to climb the building’s features. The work is intended as a fun exploration of Joondalup’s built environment and subtly questions the relationship between urban space and the body.  

The artwork continues the interests of a significant body of work made by Coates about climbing public art and the ‘kinesphere’ - a spatial term to describe the immediate or ‘reachable’ space within one’s own body without moving from one place. Much of Coates’ practice draws from her background as a climber and freediver, as a way of interrogating our relationships with built space and the natural world. In Façade Climb, Coates’ and her longtime climbing partner, Shevaun Cooley, appear to climb the library façade, utilising the architraves around two windows as climbing holds. In presenting this physical scenario of two climbers in suspension and connection, the work explores themes of physical endurance, female athleticism and the bonds between women climbers. 

Intended as a visual illusion, the work was created through a combination of on-site photography and a digital post-production stage. The final work offers a playful and hypothetical moment that reframes our understanding of the body within architecture, posing a reconsideration of its limits and possibilities.  

Coates was selected for this commission through the City’s 2023 Invitation Art Prize. 

Born in Albany, WA, Erin Coates is a visual artist working across drawing, sculpture and film. Coates’ practice is informed by her deep interest in the natural world, biology and genre cinema. 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.  

Coates' work has been shown in both galleries and film festivals in Australia and abroad, including: rīvus: 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), Erin Coates // videos and movies // 2011-2020 Art Gallery of Western Australia (2021), Adelaide Biennial: Monster Theatres at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2020), Videobrasil - 21st Contemporary Art Biennial | Imagined Communities, São Paulo, Brasil (2019), Driving to the Ends of the Earth, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan (2018), and The National: New Australian Art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2017). 

Coates has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her work is held in major state and private collections within Australia and she is represented by Moore Contemporary. Coates is a competition level rock climber with nearly two decades of outdoor climbing experience and has worked extensively with longtime climbing partner Shevaun Cooley to create a series of artworks.