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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 embraces art's dynamic engagement with other fields, foregrounding how its multi-sensory nature creates possibilities to transform, queer, decolonize, and de-ableize knowledge.

She holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. Her curatorial accolades include 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 work has been published in journals such as Frieze, Flash Art, Third Text, Artforum, Mousse, and Hyperallergic. 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).

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. She is currently working on a new body of video work and a creative non-fiction book, engaging with embodied (disappearing, diasporic, minor) language.

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. As a public speaker, Cotter 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 and curating a year-long program Artistic Research in a World on Fire (2024–5) in venues across the US.

Portland is built on the ceded and unceded village sites and stolen land of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tumwater, Watlala bands of the Chinook, the Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Columbia River tribes, whose ongoing presence in the region extends their stewardship of this land for millennia.

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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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, and 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, re-indigenization, and 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.