Oonagh Young Gallery presents Maud Cotter’s solo exhibition ab ovo, her first show in Dublin since exhibiting with Hugh Lane Gallery in 2021. The title translates as ‘from the egg’; Cotter reads it less as a straightforward beginning than as a return to a momentum that urges us forward, towards a set of values that are unquantifiable.
Maud Cotter works with matter as something live. Rather than force her materials into shape, she unearths a mercurial presence that lurks within, and treats all material as having a will of its own, with no fixed hierarchy of value. She is interested in making pieces that contain energy derived from an ethereal mix of natural and human origin. Her sculptures often act as ‘drawing in space’, balancing weight against gesture and responding closely to the architecture they occupy, so that the work opens up the air around it instead of asserting possession. In the work weightedness, a disassembled modernist façade is held up by lighter materials, such as sponge, setting the work apart from the equilibrium of modernism.
Reinforcing her conceptual approach to sculpture, Cotter points to Jean Daive’s Under the Dome, a fragmentary memoir of his walks and conversations in Paris with Paul Celan, in which they return again and again to language, poetry, memory and loss. In it, Celan says: “The subject includes the verb. The subject is the mirror of man.” The line proposes that a thing or person can’t be separated from what it does and suggests that humans are inextricably bound with matter, a central tenet of Cotter’s practice.
This idea is embodied in her process of restructuring broken or discarded materials into new formations. The work oscillates between tenderness and unease: it begins from a place of innocence, yet the fractured forms convey something more unsettled. How, then, does one hold the weight of all that is happening today? Cotter looks for a place where “gathered brokenness” can bear the weight of the dysfunctional present. Her practice aims to cultivate a deeper, more enduring relationship with matter, to attend to the entanglement of all things, and, through that attention, to open a new way of being.
The exhibition runs at the Oonagh Young Gallery from November 5th to December 19th.
