Moore Contemporary

So many pairings and possibilities within ERIN COATES’ exceptional suite of paintings ‘Ghost Specimen’. Select one or a number of them together to capture the essence of her project.

Ghost Specimen is a response to her encounters, the entanglement of human and animal worlds, misidentification, and attention to small and significant details.

Central to the exhibition is a wondrous series of paintings titled Ghost Specimen, depicting repetition of a single mask like motif that is derived from viewing the skull of the extinct Chaeropus. The use of a single and repeated image enacts a form of relentless and flawed remembering. It attempts to extract and extrapolate from the extinct form, to generate further data from it. It becomes an aberrant echo. As the series progressed, Coates found that she no longer needed to look at the image of the skull, as every part of the form had become fixed in her mind, yet the rhythmic repetition displayed small mis-rememberings. This process both references and diverges from scientific methods of study and the result is an array of unique fluidly formed expressions of a skull that are energised by colour and material choices. On a consistent tablet-like form these paintings are utterly contemporary yet with additions of gold leaf, bronze powder, graphite, watercolour and acrylic, some feel like relics or hieroglyphic.

Left: ‘Ghost Specimen XVII’, 2026
watercolour, acrylic on board
33 x 25cm each (framed)

Right: ‘Ghost Specimen XVI’, 2026
watercolour, acrylic on board
33 x 25cm each (framed)

Images Courtesy the Artist and MOORE CONTEMPORARY.

GALLERY CLOSED TODAY 26th - SPECIAL OPENING HOURS SUNDAY 27th

1:00 - 4:00pm

Current Exhibition: ERIN COATES ‘Ghost Specimen’

Image from the stockroom:

BRIAN BLANCHFLOWER
‘Untitled Monochrome’ 2005-21
acrylic on linen on wood
60 x 28.5 x 3.5cm

ERIN COATES - ‘GHOST SPECIMEN’

Erin Coates’ inventive willingness to experiment with form and media allows her ideas to flourish and her work to take shape. This distinguishes her career across drawing, sculpture, installation, video and film, and most recently she has introduced painting and works combining bronze, silicone and mohair. Coates’ imaginative extrapolation from research to the poetics of art is in full force in her exhibition ‘Ghost Specimen’. A sense of the spectral and slippage pervades
the exhibition, yet the work is rich in its offering of a sense of possibility of what knowledge and what transformations might engender. She creates intrigue and beauty in the flawed, the hybrid, the speculative.

ON VIEW UNTIL 24th October

Installation views:

1. ’Auricle’, 2026
bronze, black resin, gold chain
52 x 9 x 5cm

2. Gallery view showing ‘Ghost Specimen I - XVII, 2026, suite of paintings, watercolour, acrylic, graphite, gold # leaf, bronze powder on board, each 33 x 25cm framed

‘Chaeropus to Vulpes’(hind limbs), 2026
bronze, silicone, fox fur, mohair
92 x 30 x 6cm overall

3. ‘Ghost Specimen I - XVII’, 2026

4. ‘Chaeropus to Vulpes’ ( front limbs), 2026
bronze, silicone, fox fur, mohair
72 x 25 x 4cm

Images courtesy the Artist and MOORE CONTEMPORARY.

ON VIEW NOW

ERIN COATES - GHOST SPECIMEN

Thank you to all who joined us to celebrate with ERIN COATES for the launch of her solo exhibition. All new works comprising suspended and wall sculptures and this special suite of box framed paintings on panel. Ghost Specimen I - XVII, 2026

CONGRATULATIONS Erin on an exceptional body of work.

DM or Email: [email protected] for catalogue with introduction and works list.

COMING SOON
ERIN COATES ‘GHOST SPECIMEN’

MOORE CONTEMPORARY is delighted to announce the forthcoming solo exhibition ‘Ghost Specimen’ by ERIN COATES, 19th September - 24th October.

Erin Coates’ imaginative extrapolation from research to the poetics of art is in full force in Ghost Specimen. A sense of the spectral and slippage pervades the exhibition, yet this new body of work is rich in its offering of a sense of possibility of what knowledge and what transformations might engender. She creates intrigue and beauty in the flawed, the hybrid, the speculative.

The exhibition comprises a suite of seventeen paintings on board and several sculptures in materials such as bronze, silicone, mohair, resin. This exciting and anticipated work emanates from a museological encounter with the specimen of an extinct marsupial, Chaeropus yirratji, a species of pig-footed bandicoot that remained misidentified until nearly 70 years after its disappearance. During a residency at the Western Australian Museum, Coates was able to view the skull and bones of Chaeropus yirratji and consult with Curator of Mammalogy, Dr Kenny Travouillon.

Coates’ heightened curiosity into marine sciences, ecology and faunal remnants is in part attributable to her upbringing within a seafaring family in Albany and the free-range qualities that proximity to ocean and landscape brought. Fundamental life themes of human and environmental frailty endure in her work and so too does an optimism for the powers of regeneration and transformation. Her art often stems from an immersion - be it field research, a residency or, more literally, her own physical pursuits of free diving and climbing.

In ‘Ghost Specimen’ submerged histories and obscured memories are brought into an exhibition that is vitally present.

‘Ghost Specimen V’, 2026
gold leaf, bronze powder, watercolour, acrylic, graphite on board
33 x 25cm framed

‘Auricle’, 2026
bronze, black resin, gold chain
52 x 9 x 5cm

‘Ghost Specimen’ III’, 2026
watercolour, acrylic, graphite on board
33 x 25cm framed

Images courtesy the artist and MOORE CONTEMPORARY.

In the foreground:

TOVE KJELLMARK
‘Chimera’, 2025 #
paper clay, watercolour, putty, PLA, MDF
65 x 43 x 32cm

In the background:

PILAR MATA DUPONT
‘The Madman is a Dreamer Awake’, 2013-15
Giclée Prints
80 x 120cm framed
Ed 5

Enquires: DM or Email: [email protected]

ON VIEW in ‘Undying’ by ABDUL-RAHMAN ABDULLAH at Griffith University Art Museum.

detail: ‘Rabbit (Preparation)’, 2026
Painted wood
17 x 31 x 12cm

📸Courtesy Chau Chak Wing Museum

Inspired by research into museum archives and specimens, ABDULLAH has produced a major solo exhibition exploring notions of perpetuity - “to imagine the passage of life, death and whatever comes next, and look for ways to describe forever.”

Mummification - being a means of preservation, offering, companionship or food supply - this sculpture in wood of a bandaged rabbit captures a moment of stasis that looks remarkably alive.

A full list of works on view is available:

Email: [email protected]

Visit Griffith University Art Museum

NEWLY COMPLETED AND INSTALLED.

LISA WOLFGRAMM
‘Float’, 2026
oil on linen
36 panels each 45.72 x 45.72cm
Overall 139.16 x 559.64cm
Commissioned by INPEX Art Program Perth.
📸: Joel Barbitta, DMax Photography 2026

Congratulations to artist Lisa Wolfgramm on the completion of a major painting commissioned for INPEX Australia headquarters.

Fulfilling a location requirement and brief, ‘Float’ is an expansive contemporary reflection upon the celebrated woodblock prints Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (c.1831) by Ukiyo-e print master Katsushika Hokusai. The highly recognised and loved image of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, within this series by Hokusai, was one departure point for the conception of ‘Float’.

It is also a tribute more broadly to the Ukiyo or ‘Floating World’ period in picture-making. Significantly with the use of diagonals to create a new type of spatial order that later proved to be an important influence on the artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist periods, and additionally the blue and white palette. Access to new pigments at that time, especially Prussian blue allowed for a wider tonal range where previously prints were made in black and white.

Committed to non-figurative painting, Wolfgramm created this tableau employing her fluid technique of translucent and opaque application over block colour.

CONGRATULATIONS to ERIN COATES on bringing to fruition her residency with Albany’s Historic Whaling Station into an exhibition, and additionally an intervention in the building unceremoniously known as The Cutting Up Deck.

Erin has drawn upon her own family seafaring upbringing in Albany, her personal experience in diving, natural and marine ecologies and the whaling history to create a project of reflection and regeneration.

In September Erin will present a new body of work in the Gallery in a solo exhibition at MOORE CONTEMPORARY. 👌