We're Always Touching Underwater / Where All is Blue

We're Always Touching Underwater is a new film work by Erin Coates, with music by Alice Humphries and Louise Devenish. The soundtrack features an adaptation of Where All is Blue, a sliding, sinking, watery sounding work for aluminium tubes, crotales and vibraphone that creates sonic illusions inspired by the visual illusion that colour fades the deeper you go below the water’s surface.

The film 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.

Music recorded by Al McLean in the David Li Digital Hub at Monash University, it was funded through an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE200100555) by the Australian Government.

EXHIBITIONS and PERFORMANCES

29 November 2024: Performance of where all is blue at Hypnos Theatre, Malmö, Sweden

27 April 2024: Performance of where all is blue at the Day of Percussion

9 and 13 July 2024: Screening of We’re Always Touching Underwater at Revelation Film Festival, Surreal Shorts, Perth

12 - 16 June 2024: Screening of We’re Always Touching Underwater at Film Maudit 2.0 Film Festival, Los Angeles

11- 20 August 2023: Screening of We’re Always Touching Underwater at Walyalup Waters exhibition at PSAS Arts Space for Wayalup Festival (premiere)

View excerpt of film below.

TEASER: Erin Coates, We’re always touching underwater, 2023, 7:31 minutes, video, with sound composed by Alice Humphries with percussion by Louise Devenish. Image courtesy the artist and Moore Contemporary.