#maud cotter

Limerick City Gallery- Post 1 - Maud Cotter

Three separate occasions during this semester I have seen the exhibition in the Lavit Gallery titled: Taking Form Students of the Year 1973-77 featuring the work of three former students of the Crawford College of Art: Maud Cotter, Eilis O’Connell, and Vivienne Roche.

Curated by Sarah Kelliher and Brian Mac Domhnaill.

Video Source: https://vimeo.com/360493393

Image of “without stilling” by Maud Cotter.

Image Source: http://maudcotter.com/?page_id=1721

Research: Maud Cotter

17/11/2020

Above, I have included a link to a short video that I found while researching Maud Cotter, in which she discusses some of her works. I have also included an image of one of her pieces, “without stilling”.

Maud Cotter is an Irish artist who was born in 1954. She co-founded the National Sculpture Factory and is a member of Aosdána. She is known for working with artistic media such as sculpture, installation and mixed media.

I find Cotter’s approach to creating her sculptural and installation works to be fascinating. I feel that works, such as Cotter’s large-scale piece “without stilling”, showcase her masterfully unique approach to making structures, which I think are visually interesting, particularly in the case of the structure of “without stilling”, which is constructed from layers of birch ply that are strategically placed on top of each other and appear to gradually ascend in a manner which resembles steps.

From researching the work of Maud Cotter, I feel that I could consider the possibility of further exploring light and shadows in my own work, and I would also like to investigate the idea of creating my own sculptural structure, as I do not have a great deal of previous experience in working with the medium of sculpture.

Additional Source: https://domobaal.com/resources/maudcotter/maud-cotter-a-consequence-of-without-stilling-works-list.pdf

Additional Source: http://maudcotter.com/

Additional Source: http://maudcotter.com/?page_id=1254

Maud Cotter

Sieve, or points of decision in redistribution steel, birch ply, paint, 570 x 250 x 90 cms, 2012-2013

A Solution is in the Room, 9 September – 7 October, CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork, 2013

Statement:

We exist in a network of relations, one that allows formation in pattern in order to engage with its force.  In this field of play, in which things carom, my practice lies.   Sculpture as an action is critical to our understanding of this mercurial game of randomness and order.  I understand the human condition as being, not just tentative by virtue of our vulnerability, but one that is necessarily so, in order to retain our closeness of connection with a changing world.

Moments in which one thing resonates with another are special.  This gather, or coupling, of elements is at its most profound when a feeling of the found is retained in the final mix ; when aesthetic boundaries are not forced.  Corporate culture limits our relationship with matter into measurable units, offering us only an impoverished understanding, a limited relationship, deactivated matter, captured and dead.   Within the intangible lies the aesthetic glue that allows units of matter to reach a transcendent whole.  Recognition and activation of the void provides a deep level of integration of idea and matter.  Making in this arena of presence and absence, within the full context of the work, offers continuity, live engagement - a propagation of form and idea.  Achieving this level of live engagement within the work is my primary goal.  I seeks to assert such spatial sequences, movements in time, as the viewer moves around the work in a commitment of seeing, allowing the piece to reach completion in their perception of it.  The strength of the work lies in its ability to hold intangible moments, to capture a part of the void, like a ghost within the work.

In June 1999, we exhibited A Measured Quietude: Contemporary Irish Drawings, with the title taken from William Butler Yeats’s poem “To Ireland in the Coming Time”, which explored significant themes and characteristics of twentieth-century Irish visual art. Our exhibition was a companion to When Time Began to Rant and Rage: Figurative Painting from Twentieth- Century Ireland at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

Maud Cotter’s In Absence was a wall of imposing proportions fashioned from fragile materials. Conceived as a brittle, tentative presence, its delicate, translucent skin of cardboard and plaster framed in steel constituted an incongruous and all too permeable a barrier between the viewer and the more solid wall. It was a gleaming porous monument to immateriality and impermanence. 

John Kindness was commissioned to produce a large-scale wall drawing in The Drawing Room. The wall drawings achieved both a retrieval and a domestication of Classical narratives, a contemporary renovation of antique mythology while humorously cutting it down to size. 

Colin Darke’s drawings comprised an accumulation of hand-written text inscribed on cigarette papers joined together and arranged in a grid of regular vertical columns interspersed by a repeated graphic image. The cigarette papers refer to a well-known method among political prisoners in Northern Ireland of passing on secret messages.

Images: Colin Darke, Comm II - On the Question of Dialectics, 1991. Ink on cigarette papers. 18 1/4 x 17 1/2.

Maud Cotter, In Absence, 1998. Cardboard, plaster, and steel. 192 15/16 x 114 3/16 x 1 3/16. Rubicon Gallery, Dublin.

Karl Burke and Maud Cotter: The Air They Capture Is Different.

The MAC, Belfast.