With grace and an occasional quiet sense of humour, through her sculptures Maud Cotter confronts the dilemmas of human existence, the isolation felt by the individual in society and the way in which people’s lives and consciousness are interwoven. Her work hovers somewhere between conditions of transparency and opaqueness, floating and grounded, spiritual and material. However, her central concern is the relationship between human beings and the world, which she articulates through an exploration of how the body explores and inhabits personal spaces, particularly in the built environment. Her sculptures are designed to heighten the viewer’s awareness of space, air, silence, and, within all this, their own existence. Her work goes beyond simple objects: many are complex and architectural in character - walls divide rooms, sculptures lean against walls, tall tubes enclose space. These sculptures are constructed of materials such as white plaster, brown corrugated cardboard and stainless steel. The cardboard is sliced into thin strips that are then coated with resin to form a screen-like material of surprising strength (Fig 2). In contrast with her early work in flashed and stained glass, Cotter’s more recent sculptures do not employ strong colours. Her materials and techniques evoke a domestic world of stuccowork, lace curtains and linen tablecloths. She rejects the Utopianism inherent in Modernist aesthetics, preferring to deal with the ordinary and everyday. Elegant and austere, her art nonetheless provides a critique of the idealism which underpinned much of the art and architecture of the 20th century

IIn seeking to understand Cotter’s art, it is worth taking as a starting point the simplest situation, of a person standing in an empty room. From this starting point, the artist articulates a range of deceptively fragile works that induce an awareness of the senses of sight, sound and touch. Sound is also important, and is explored through the positioning of works, altering the acoustics of the space. Cotter creates highly sensitized territories, employing the artistic vocabulary of Arte Povera and Minimalist artists but with an architectural sensibility that references Frederick Keisler and Charles and Ray Eames. Through employing Minimalist techniques, she allows the senses of the viewer to breathe, rather than being overwhelmed with sense data. Cotter’s art allows silence to enter a room, bringing conversation to an end and allowing the works to come to life, the delicate play of light penetrating the ‘skin’ of card and plaster, qualities of solidity or transparency changing as the observer changes position in the room. She employs materials with their own memories, and while her works reference the body, in her avoidance of figuration, they do not intrude on the observer’s own memories but instead invite an active participation or engagement with the work.

Born in Wexford in 1954, Cotter studied at the Crawford College of Art in Cork between 1972 and 1978. A student of sculpture, she also learned photography and silver-smithing. Studying for her PTA te a ‘craft’ subject in her PTA she learned the technique of stained glass. But from the outset, with its strong expressive sculptural quality, her work in stained glass moved beyond the aesthetic confines suggested by the term craft, Her work was innovative in terms of its non-figurative aesthetic, while her quirky titles animated the intellectual context. A commission in 1988 resulted in a stained glass window in Dublin Castle, That Sound Meets Sense Straight as Lemons Meet Fish, while six years later another commission led to the mixed media work Absolute Jellies Make Singing Sounds, installed on the exterior of the Green Building in Temple Bar (Fig 8). From the outset, Cotter resolutely avoided figurative references in her work, a bias commented on by Nicola Gordon Bowe: ‘Cotter believes safe, figurative pre-conceptions and an inhibited misapplication of the form have been prevalent in Ireland, catalogue essay ‘Cork Glass Art in Context’ by Dr Gordon Bowe (1986). Bowe went on to remark on Cotter’s love of the ‘potency, psychological intensity and visual richness of the colour within glass, its live, solidified liquid properties which can be tempered by lines of lead, painting medium and acided with a variety of resists’.

In 1991 a solo exhibition My Tender Shell, partly inspired by an extended trip to Iceland, revealed Cotter’s work taking a new direction, towards a more personal, existential consciousness. The title of the exhibition hinted at both the artist’s own personal vulnerability, resulting from a change in her personal life, but also at a new sense of clarity and resoluteness. The following year, Cotter moved to London, where the shock of being uprooted from the familiar cultural milieu of Cork into a populous city prompted a radical shift in terms of her approach to sculpture, towards a more austere, urban, sensibility. The awarding of a fellowship and studio at Delfina Studios near London Bridge Station enabled her to pursue new ideas in her work, while the neutral environment of a large city provided her with an intellectual freedom from the constraints of her earlier art practice. Moving to London not only altered her way of looking at the world, but also her sense of her own being. ‘Exile is fantastic. It is the neutrality of it, and the fact that you can look back on yourself. You get to a point where you can remove both from where you are and where you came from.’ (0044 exhibition catalogue, Nuala Fenton 1999).

If the condition of exile influenced the conceptual development of her work, the studio and fellowship at Delfina facilitated further research and development of ideas that had germinated in Iceland. Visiting exhibitions such as The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy, and researching at the library of the Wellcome Institute gave Cotter a new insight into aspects of anatomy and human psychology. Moving away from glass, she began to explore the qualities of opaqueness and transparency in a wide range of materials. Transparency became less a means of conveying pure sensation and more a way of addressing ideas about the body and the structures we build around the body. However, the abstract aesthetic in her work remained strong, with a new kind of beauty emerging from the use of everyday materials. While stained glass alters the colour and mood of a space, it is essentially intangible. What Cotter began to explore was the enclosure of space, and the way in which that space responds to human presence in a more immediate and tangible way.

In 1996 Cotter was invited by the Economist group to show a series of works, entitled Shroud, at the Economist Plaza in the City of London. As part of her exhibition In Absence at the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin two years later, she built a wall of card mesh set in a steel frame. The mesh was skimmed with plaster so as to retain a sense of transparency. The work suggested both fabric, in the sense of clothing, and the fabric of buildings. As the title of the work suggested, the intention was to highlight the absence was well as the presence of the body. In 1999 she completed a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The following year, she was shortlisted for the IMMA Glen Dimplex prize and was also elected a member of Aosdana. Among her group and solo exhibitions was 0044, shown at PS1 in New York in 1999, and A Measured Quietude, at the Drawing Center in New York that same year. The sculpture We Exchanged a Few Words was one of a number of card and plaster works shown at the West Cork Arts Centre in 2001. Composed of five open-ended cylinders mounted on the wall one above the other, this fragile personal codex suggested containers of memory, like the wax cylinders used a century ago to record the human voice (Fig 3). Leaning against the gallery wall, In a Short Time resembled in its form a sheet of corrugated iron, but the metal had been translated into fragile plaster and cardboard with a polished surface (Fig 7). Three tall tubes entitled the Evidence of Things took the potential of thin strips of corrugated card and resin to an extreme, standing free in the gallery space, with no armature. On a smaller scale, two ovoid tablets of plaster and card, The Same Amount resembled simple quern stones, worn from much rubbing. The engineering of Nervi was recalled in the thin vertical lattice work of Originally There Were Two of Us, formed of plaster on a criss-cross armature.

In a group exhibition entitled Solid Space held in February 2004 at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast, Cotter carried her ideas about the division and enclosure of space to new levels. Her large-scale sculpture More Than Anything, was made using thousands of interlocking plywood squares (Figs 1 & 4). It was configured in a direct response to the space, the interlocking elements forming a wall that divided the long gallery, rising until it nearly touched the vaulted ceiling. Speaking about the installation of this work, Cotter remarks how the rounded roof ‘softened’ the space, and how her work responded to this ‘I wanted to make the room more alert, I wanted to find that point in a room that would make it more tense. The desire that I feel is in the space, induces the piece to become the shape it is.’ While initially appearing to be a homage to Modernism, More Than Anything is anti-Modernist in that it critiques the belief that system-built architecture could provide housing solutions suitable to the 20th century. The artist describes the work as ‘a formal mechanism that ingests space’ its ‘intention moving ahead of the form itself’. This sense of using the full height of the gallery space was employed by Cotter in the realisation of several permanent works, commissioned for the new Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast in 2002. The tallest of the three aerofoil section sculptures, Of Air and Everything, is architectural both in presence and means of construction. Over eight metres high, the work is suspended in the atrium of the hospital, and extends through two floors of the building (Fig 5). In many ways, it resembles a steel framed skyscraper, or the aerofoil section of an aeroplane wing, the rectangular sections formed by the stainless steel grid filled with the artists’ trademark device of curved translucent screens made of strips of corrugated cardboard, coated with resin.

Within Cotter’s working with materials such as plywood, steel or cardboard lies a paradox. Her sculptures such as More Than Anything are not exhibited or shown in the conventional sense, they interact with the space to alter the viewer’s sense of spatial experience. This sense in which the work of art is apprehended in an experiential way has remained a constant thread in Cotter’s work from the outset of her career. The way in which stained glass changes the entire character and feeling of a space, the way in which it is apprehended by the viewer, is central to her work. However, from the elusiveness of light being transformed as it passes through coloured glass, Cotter’s art is now dealing with the process of mind and consciousness. What remains a constant is an elemental pre-linguistic sense of the myriad, the innumerable, and the way in which randomness and order form a state of creative tension.

Cotter is interested in the possibility of a work of art that potentially can go on forever. Although occupying a finite space in the gallery, works such as More Than Anything contains the possibility of the infinite. There are biological similes in the work, connections with theories of how viruses replicate and spread, or with DNA, the building blocks of life. Building on the ideas explored in More Than Anything, she has developed In Other Circumstances, a work in which pre-cut laminated cardboard elements are used, instead of plywood squares (Fig 6). The shiny surface of the cards reflects rather than absorbs light, and their resemblance to playing cards suggests games of chance where patterns emerge despite repeated shuffling of the deck. Unsurprisingly, particularly in the area of Modernist architecture and design, there are precedents for the modular slotted unit that Cotter has developed as a sculptural element. In 1952, Charles and Ray Eames designed a card set that could be slotted together in different ways, to suggest different possibilities for living spaces. The Austrian architect Keisler also explored the notion of a house that could develop organically. His theories were based on the idea that all things and beings live in a state of interconnectedness and are in a continual state of evolution. He called his habitation design The Endless House, a phrase used also by Cotter to describe More Than Anything ‘It’s a phrase that intensifies language, driving the ordinary into a state of excess.’ Carrying this idea of interconnectedness and continual evolution further, Cotter recently commissioned a mathematician to devise a game in which people could interact with her sculpture. Although governed by a set of rules, as time passes, the work develops its own personality. This process underlies most of Cotter’s art, highlighting a humanist, rather than formalist, basis to her work. This humanist interest extends to the phenomenological, to the psychology of the body and of place. The way in which people engage with the work, or interact with it, is important to the artist. Cotter describes another of her works in development, entitled Amalgam (Fig 9). This will be composed of elements that can be transformed, to read as different architectural elements: ‘a wall that morphs into a chair that morphs into a table and a shelving unit’ is how she describes the piece.

Although her work has moved steadily towards a more architectural expression, and Cotter does not see herself as an architect, nonetheless she has recently been involved with projects in which urban design, architecture and art come together. Having returned from London to Cork in 1998, much of her thinking in recent years has focused on her native city, ‘Cork is a great city to study urbanity. You can look at its suburbs, the way in which they evolve, with clarity. It’s an easy model for architectural students to get a grip, to get to know a city and how its evolves.’ Putting these aspirations into practice, she collaborated with architect Andrew Lane, of McDonagh Lane and Associates, in designs for permanent stalls for an open-air city market in Cork. These brought together the ideas of the traders, urban design concepts and the artist’s own highly attuned sensibility of the city and its inhabitants. She is passionate about revitalising the city centre of Cork as a living entity, not only through her practice as an artist but also as a resident, developing in consultation with the city council a model for urban renewal in the Shandon area. Although the project was to an extent conceptually driven by Cotter, having given the design team a clear idea of what she wanted, she stayed outside the design process. Andrew Lane and engineer Chris Southgate drew up plans for the adaptation of a traditional house and adjoining site into a residence and studio for Cotter and her partner. Although internally full of Modernist references, the project preserves the traditional vernacular of the exterior, with its sandstone wall and sash windows. Cotter describes it as ‘a subtle response to the existing vernacular’ in the way it negotiates the relationship between domestic and work space. Echoing her approach to her own sculpture, she sees it as ‘connecting with the vernacular’ combining a dramatic use of space with an intimate feeling.

In spite of their large scale, it is important for the artist that her work retains a level of intimacy with the viewer. Cotter describes the effect when sculptures are devoid of meaning as ‘corrosive’ and emphasises the conceptual basis of her art, even when it references craft skills such as lace-work, or Modernist architectural idioms. This appeal to the everyday is achieved through her eschewing ‘high’ art materials traditionally employed by sculptors, such as bronze, silver or marble. She works with iron, cardboard and plaster in a spirit of free association, allowing the materials and their physical properties to determine the appearance and feeling of the final work. Ideas are explored, and if the artist decides they don’t work, they are shelved and new avenues explored. And always there is the sense of humanity that underlies Cotter’s art, where she seeks the residual sense of habitation in a room, the emotional memories that can linger in a place, or the attachment formed by people for objects and places.

Cotter explored this idea in a poem entitled also, the first four lines of which sum up the essence of her art:

      the implied desire of an empty room
      is held at the brink of impatience,
      while the air we shift on opening
      a door defers our passing.

Peter Murray is Curator of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork.
An exhibition of recent work by Maud Cotter, More Than Anything, will be held at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo, 30 September-31 October 2004.