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Art-Making

The Unknown Future

Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland

12 March 2020

  • The Unknown Future, 2020

    The Unknown Future, 2020

Soetsu Yanagi’s book The Unknown Craftsman sought to reconsider the value of making and spearheaded the survival of craft at a time of threatened obsolescence, leading to the mingei (folk art) movement that became known worldwide. He was radical in including undervalued Indigenous craft and mass hand production by ordinary people as well as culturally sanctioned craft traditions.

In this lecture performance, Lucy Cotter draws parallels between Yanagi’s reflection and contemporary questions about artistic ecology and the sustainability of art practice. Alternating between Yanagi’s understandings and today’s norms, she pries open the normative structures of contemporary art making, including the invention of the contemporary artist-function and other seemingly permanent professional roles, and speculates open-endedly on future scenarios.

Art-Making

My current work engages with (disappearing, diasporic, and minor) languages and their landscapes as intertwined topographies, using the Irish language (Gaeilge) as a departure point. Related drawings and prints explore orality and the resonance of language. A further video work in progress uses language to enter Irish immigrant history, the complexities of identity, and my experiences in present-day US. These works are unfolding in parallel with my hybrid book in progress, Between Language– A Love Song.

In recent years, I have worked on an experimental play, engaging with cultural belief systems and the limits of knowledge, and two lecture performances that challenge hierarchies in perceived cultural value in art. A further series of multi-media works on paper has engaged with cultural silences, withholding and expression in tandem with my cross-genre book, The Shape of Silence.

My artistic practice has encompassed installation, video, photography, performance, printmaking, and artist’s books, with solo and group exhibitions and performances in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US. Venues include Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Aachener Kunstverein, Germany; 1430 Contemporary, Portland, US, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; The Globe Gallery, Newcastle, UK; Mehrwert e.v., Aachen, Germany; Wexford Arts Center, Wexford, Ireland; Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Ireland; Art Hive, Cork, Ireland; Bilderhaus Bornemann Galerie, Germany; Outpost Venice, Italy; Lavitt’s Quay Gallery, Cork; and the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, US. My artist’s books are held in the New York Public Library art collection.

Selected Recent Work

Artmaking is an exercise in precision and ambiguity. Each closer examination reveals another hidden gesture, a play between withholding and expressing. Sometimes I think that everything I have ever made is a collage. An oscillation between materiality and metaphor, an attempt to open up cracks between surfaces.