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Writing

Turnstones

Oregon Center for Contemporary Art

2022

Conceived during the US presidential elections and ultimately taking place during the global pandemic, the year-long Turnstones program, curated by Lucy Cotter as Curator in Residence at Oregon Center for Contemporary Art foregrounded artists who engage material and embodied processes to unearth possibilities for new thinking and reframing imaginaries in pursuit of social transformation.

Writing

Lucy Cotter's writing encompasses art criticism, cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, art history, art theory, ficto-theory, poetry, exhibition, dance, performance, and cross-disciplinary texts. She often experiments with the generative relationship between art-making and writing processes, allowing the subject to shape the form of her writing.

She is the author of Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019, expanded 2nd ed. 2024), a book foregrounding the singular nature of artistic thinking in dialogue with acclaimed artists worldwide. She is a regular contributor to books on contemporary art and culture by academic presses and has published in catalogues and monographs on Haegue Yang, Rabih Mroué, Katarina Zdjelar, Manuela Infante, and Brian O’Doherty, among other artists.

Her art critical writing has appeared in Flash Art, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Oregon Artswatch, CARA, Field Day, and Frieze, among other journals. She is the editor of several exhibition catalogues, including Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh for the 57th Venice Biennale, and has guest-edited a number of art journals, including MaHKUscript Journal for Arts Research and Third Text.

Cotter's creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in Typishly, Cirque, The Brooklyn Rail, Sea Wolf and Mousse Magazine, among other journals. She is an alum of Tin House and Corporeal Writing. She is currently working on a creative non-fiction book engaging with (disappearing, minor, and postcolonial) language.

Books

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research: Expanded Second Edition

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    Expanding the original book with additional artist dialogues and a new essay, this edition explores the changing stakes of artistic research in a world reckoning with social justice, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence through a series of 24 in-depth dialogues with artists worldwide.

    2024

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    In twenty conversations with leading artists worldwide, Lucy Cotter maps out an epistemology of artistic creation. She manifests a type of research that is dynamically engaged with other fields, but thinks beyond concepts into bodily and material knowledge that exceeds language, revolutionizing our perception of art from the ground up.

    2019

Books in Progress

Book Chapters & CATALOGUE ESSAYS

  • unraveling: practice-led curating

    Companion to Curatorial Futures

    Bridget Crone, Bassam el Baroni, Matthew Poole, eds.

    Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

    forthcoming 2026
    2026

  • Haegue Yang: Day and Night

    Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness

    Fergal Gaynor, ed.

    Cork: National Sculpture Factory

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Global Engagement and Modalities of Looking: Brian Maguire, Richard Mosse, and Yuri Pattison

    Routledge Companion to Irish Art

    Fionna Barber and Fintan Cullen, eds.

    London: Routledge

    2025

  • Un-knowing the Library: A Sculptural Rereading

    Jess Perlitz: Reductions of Mountains

    Stephanie Snyder, ed.

    Portland: Cooley Gallery, Reed College

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Delegitimizing the Continuum of Violence

    Brian Maguire: The Grand Illusion

    Dublin: The Hugh Lane National Gallery

    2024

  • The Warp and Weft of History

    Kristina Benjocki: The Warp and Weft of History

    Amsterdam: Looiersgracht 60

    2023

  • Fact as Fiction: A Dialogue with Rabih Mroué

    Rabih Mroué: Interviews

    Nadim Samman, ed.

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    2023

  • Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge

    Manuela Infante: Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking

    Giovanni Aloi, ed.

    Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

    2023

  • Beyond the Walls of National Identity: The Triangulation of Art Criticism, Curatorial Discourse, and Artistic Practice

    Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on Change

    Yvonne Scott and Christine Kennedy, eds.

    Dublin: Royal Hibernian Academy

    2022

  • Braiding: Transgenerational Artistic Comradeship

    Katarina Zdjelar (monograph)

    Middlesborough: Institute of Modern Art & Teeside University

    2022

  • (tropisms) away from and towards the thing, it, she

    Natasha Pike (artist's book)

    Dublin: Arts Council

    2022

  • Between and Beyond the Dramaturgical

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • The Space Beyond Boundaries (On Rosie Heinrich)

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • Walking the Wrinkled Plane

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • Preparing for Liquefaction

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • The Accidental Symbol: Performance as a Conduit

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • After a While, Reflectively: Performing an Ecology of Composition Practice

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • The Body as a Crease of Knowledge

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Art Stars and Plasters on the Wounds: Why Have There Been No Great Irish Artists?

    Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader

    Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy, eds.

    Cork: Cork University Press

    2021

  • Unknowing Culture

    Persistent Traces of Things to Come

    Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska, eds.

    Amsterdam: Sun and Stars

    2020

  • Mercurial States

    e-flux Education

    2019

  • Towards an autonomy of self, towards a community of self

    Katarina Zdjelar: Vladimir

    Lucerne: Centre of Contemporary Art

    2019

  • Cinema Olanda: Toward a Platform, Realized and Anticipated

    Blessing and Transgressing: A Live Institute

    Defne Ayas, ed.

    London: Cornerhouse

    2018

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Aspen 5+6

    Brian O Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique, ed. Christa Maria Lerm Hayes. Amsterdam: Valiz

    2017

  • Cinema Olanda: Projecting the Netherlands

    Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, ed. Lucy Cotter, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, p. 11–21

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6, An Early Exposition

    The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia

    Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, eds.

    Leiden: Leiden University Press.

    2014

  • Close Listening: Katarina Zdjelar’s My lifetime (Malaika)

    Katarina Zdjelar: Of More Than One Voice

    Vitoria-Gasteiz: Artium Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art

    2013

  • 180 Degrees: The University after Artistic Research

    Art Education: A Glossary

    Tom Vandeputte, ed.

    Amsterdam: Sandberg Institute

    2013

  • Libia Olafur: The Future of Hospitality

    Under Deconstruction: Icelandic Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale

    Ellen Blumenstein, ed.

    Berlin: Sternberg Press

    2011

The above contributions are selected from 2011–2025. A list of selected earlier publications (2003–2010) is available on request.

Journals

The above contributions are selected from 2018–2025 only. A list of selected earlier publications from 2003–2017 is available on request.

The keys of a computer are not entirely different than those of a piano. Fingers moving across a plane, producing sounds that are spoken or read. Tracing how material and embodied sensibilities can undermine the imposition of language; how words can act as placeholders for emerging subject positions and worldmaking. Embraced as a medium, writing aligns itself with the internal logic of art making.