Maud Cotter
Sieve, or points of decision in redistribution steel, birch ply, paint, 570 x 250 x 90 cms, 2012-2013
A Solution is in the Room, 9 September – 7 October, CIT Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork, 2013
Statement:
We exist in a network of relations, one that allows formation in pattern in order to engage with its force. In this field of play, in which things carom, my practice lies. Sculpture as an action is critical to our understanding of this mercurial game of randomness and order. I understand the human condition as being, not just tentative by virtue of our vulnerability, but one that is necessarily so, in order to retain our closeness of connection with a changing world.
Moments in which one thing resonates with another are special. This gather, or coupling, of elements is at its most profound when a feeling of the found is retained in the final mix ; when aesthetic boundaries are not forced. Corporate culture limits our relationship with matter into measurable units, offering us only an impoverished understanding, a limited relationship, deactivated matter, captured and dead. Within the intangible lies the aesthetic glue that allows units of matter to reach a transcendent whole. Recognition and activation of the void provides a deep level of integration of idea and matter. Making in this arena of presence and absence, within the full context of the work, offers continuity, live engagement - a propagation of form and idea. Achieving this level of live engagement within the work is my primary goal. I seeks to assert such spatial sequences, movements in time, as the viewer moves around the work in a commitment of seeing, allowing the piece to reach completion in their perception of it. The strength of the work lies in its ability to hold intangible moments, to capture a part of the void, like a ghost within the work.
My current body of work feeds on the skeletal tenacity and fitness for function of an eclectic mix of objects, interior and exterior. Litter-bins, sieves, filters; holders of the transient flow of the discarded and used take the floor. They are space frames, carriers within which things exist. Released from corporate constraints and values, they are transformed, renewed, re-expressed in space, claiming an intangible territory of aesthetic measure. What is of use is retained, reinterpreted, that which passes through continues on a cycle of it's own revision.
