Skip to content
X

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 artistic practice has encompassed sculpture, installation, photography, video, collage, and artist’s books. Following a hiatus during which I focused solely on curating, writing and educating, my recent projects include an experimental play entitled The Entangled Museum, a lecture performance, a series of collages, and a cross-genre book entitled The Shape of Silence. I am currently working on cloch: 42 words for stone [working title], a body of mixed media and video work engaging with language and landscape as intertwined postcolonial topographies. In parallel, I am writing a related cross-genre book entitled Between Language [working title].

I have exhibited and performed my work in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US at venues including Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Aachener Kunstverein, Germany; Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, The Globe Gallery, Newcastle, UK; Mehrwert e.v., Aachen; Wexford Arts Center, Wexford; Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Ireland; Art Hive, Cork, Bilderhaus Bornemann Galerie, Germany; Outpost Venice, Italy; Lavitt’s Quay Gallery, Cork; 1430 Contemporary, Portland, and the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland. Recent residencies include Camp Colton, Oregon (2024) and the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, California (2023). My artist’s books are held in the New York Public Library art collection.

Current Work

Selected Recent Work

Artmaking is an exercise in precision and ambiguity. Each closer examination reveals another hidden gesture, a repetition foregrounding difference, a play between withholding and expressing. Sometimes I think that everything I have ever made is a collage. An attempt to open up cracks between surfaces, an oscillation between materiality and metaphor. An incessant dialogue that never stops preceding and extending itself beyond itself