Erin Coates: Kinesphere

Full description

BACKGROUND Portela's (2013) work on "the interactions between embodied reading practices, semiotic and bibliographic codes, and the textual engines of print books..." is tested by certain publication design practices, such as Danielewski's novels (2000, 2006, 2011). These contain the potential to disrupt traditional reading practices, generating new and unexpected meanings. Drawing from the fields of the phenomenology of the artists' book and curatorial practice, this research questions the reader's relationship between embodied reading and the book. CONTRIBUTION This publication, created to accompany Erin Coates's first solo show (PICA, 2014), reinterprets the artist's documentation of her body through space and time. A limited edition artist's multiple, hand-caste climbing grip is mounted on the cover, bolted through a central hole to the back of the book, making the book inaccessible until its removal-at which time the grip becomes an explicit invitation to participate in the activity of climbing, both in physical and book space. Simionato's design projects the commissioned texts along tessellating lines inspired by points of contact of the artist-climber. The book demands navigation, disrupting familiar physiological movements of reading and ultimately articulates the reader as if they were climbing. The design extends the phenomenological experience of Coates' works and the articulation of the body in space that the artist explores. SIGNIFICANCE "Kinesphere" was commissioned and curated by PICA's chief curator Leigh Robb, for artist and film-maker Erin Coates' first solo show at PICA. Funded by the Catalyst: Katherine Hannay Visual Arts Commission, DCA (WA) and City of Perth, the book was publicly launched at PICA (2014), and later at Volume art Book Fair in Sydney who described it as a "stunning feat of design in and of itself by Andy Simionato." (Volume Artbook Fair 2015).