Erin Coates

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. Recent work has centred on the oceanic Gothic in relation to Australia’s unique marine flora and fauna and presents hybrid forms that merge human elements with various endemic life forms. Her work at times engages with a transgressive bodily aesthetic to probe our understandings of fear, horror, strength and survival and to disrupt conventional gendered roles and assumptions.

Coates’ work is shown in both galleries and film festivals and was exhibited in the 2020 Adelaide Biennial: Monster Theatres at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She was included in the significant survey exhibition The National: New Australian Art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017. In 2018 Coates’ work was shown at the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art in Japan. She was the only Australian artist selected for inclusion in Videobrasil – 21st Contemporary Art Biennial | Imagined Communities, São Paulo, Brasil, 2019.

Coates has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Leigh Robb

Leigh Robb is the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. With twenty years of experience in the arts, Robb’s previous roles include Curator at PICA – Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Associate Director at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Head of Internship Program at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Psychology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and her Masters in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Leigh is the curator of the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres. Recent curated exhibitions include Chiharu Shiota: Absence Embodied (2018) and Versus Rodin: bodies across space and time (2017) at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Leigh has curated over 40 exhibitions including solo shows and in numerous group shows, including curatorial collaborations. She is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Adelaide; a Board member of Art Monthly Australasia and ACE Open, and the Fremantle Biennale.