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About

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Lucy Cotter (Laoiseach Ní Choitir) (she/her) works across a spectrum of practice and theory, often coming full circle through writing, making, curating, and educating.

She holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. Her curatorial accolades including being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, and co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, a transnational project in six global cities. She has curated exhibitions, performance, and events internationally at venues including Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam; e-flux, New York; The Kitchen, New York; the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, and Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, Portland.

Cotter has published over 100 texts on contemporary art, highlighting its entanglement in social, cultural, and political questions. Her most recent and upcoming book chapters appear in Estado Vegetal: Plant Thinking (University of Minnesota Press); The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures (University of Edinburgh Press), The Routledge Companion to Irish Art, and catalogues such as Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness (National Sculpture Factory) and Brian Maguire: La Grande Illusion (Hugh Lane Museum). Her work has been published in journals such as Frieze, Flash Art, Third Text, Artforum, Mousse, and Hyperallergic. She is the author of Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019, 2024), a book of dialogues with artists foregrounding art as material, embodied, spatial, and choreographic thinking. Cotter exhibits her artistic work intermittently in tandem with experimental cross-genre writing.

Cotter was the inaugural director of one of Europe’s first MAs in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy, The Hague, and has taught at several art institutions in Europe and the US, including the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and Portland State University. She embraces art's dynamic engagement with other fields and how its multi-sensory nature creates possibilities to transform, queer, decolonize, and de-ableize knowledge. As a public speaker, she is acclaimed for her ability to bridge artistic and academic discourses. Irish-born, she is currently based in Portland, Oregon, where she is project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation (2024–5), and curating her year-long program Artistic Research in a World on Fire.

Portland is built on the ceded and unceded village sites of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tumwater, Watlala bands of the Chinook, the Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Columbia River tribes, who have stewarded the land for millennia and continue to make their home in the city.

Contact

You are welcome to reach out with queries about possible collaborations, guest lectures, workshops, curatorial and artistic projects, commissioning texts, or consulting; to ask me any questions about access to my work, or just to say hi. Email: info [at] lucycotter [dot] org

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In lieu of social media feed, I send out an occasional newsletter and make e-announcements about larger projects. Please email to subscribe if you wish to be kept up to date: info [at] lucycotter [dot] org

ACCESS

Please email (info [at] lucycotter [dot] org) to ask any access-related questions about my work, or to request alternative formats of books or uploaded texts for use with assistive technologies.

In an ideal world, the word “art” would be a verb. I experience writing, curating, art making, speaking, and educating as interrelated forms of practice, involving process-led, research-engaged, speculative and experimental ways of being in the world. I’m interested in the (conceptual-material, spatial-choreographic, and embodied-theoretical) thinking that emerges in and through artistic practice. I seek to make space for what is not easily accommodated, supporting art’s tendency to move towards the unknown and unknowable, the poetic and the abstract, respecting all artists’ right to equity and opacity.

I am drawn to art that seeks to re-constellate ancient, misplaced, marginalized and actively forgotten knowledge to imagine forward, and to harness new technologies for collective agency. I champion artists who engage with other disciplines on artistic terms, creating new questions. For me, decolonization, sustainability, and attention to embodied-material-site-responsive ways of being in the world go hand in hand. I embrace the multiplicity of exhibitions’ sensory, emotional, bodily and intellectual entry points, which can hold open competing time-space conceptions, and make space for neurodiverse, anti-ableist, genderfluid, and multiversal forms of intelligence. Stuart Hall once asked artists to “make art as if the world mattered.” This feels more important now than ever.