Maud Cotter's artistic career spans almost three decades, using different materials and forms to reinvent contemporary sculpture, inspired by anything from ectoplasm to hot chocolate, she tells Lara Marlowe, in Paris.
A SCULPTURE entitled So far as it goesis a clear glass coffee cup and saucer with a white substance that appears to be milk tilting diagonally inside. This is Maud Cotter at her usual game, upsetting our notions of reality, playfully defying the law of gravity.
The sculpture was used by the Centre Culturel Irlandais to advertise Cotter's recent open house in the studio, where she worked for three months. Cotter traces the idea to its moment of origin: "I ordered hot chocolate in Le Rostand cafe, by the Luxembourg gardens," she recalls. "They tilted the chocolate to one side and the other. The gentility of the gesture and the spatial sophistication of the cup kept playing in my mind."
One of the most striking things about Cotter is the way she has moved through an artistic career spanning nearly three decades, changing materials and forms, each time reinventing contemporary sculpture.
She made metal and glass shapes in the mid-1990s, and net-like structures in Lafarge model plaster around 2000. She has used cardboard, wax and PVC, turned to cast-off furniture endowed with "emotional residue" to construct disturbing animal-mineral hybrids for The cat's pyjamasin 2004, and built towers from interlocking birch ply squares to explore the late architect and artist Frederick Kiesler's concept of infinite architecture in More than anything. The titles are wonderful; Cotter has shown her work in galleries too numerous to list, across Ireland, Europe and the US, with poetic labels such as My tender shelland In absence.
Since that moment in Le Rostand cafe, Cotter has had a thing about cups and saucers: plain 1960s ones "if I'm weeding out the functionality of an object"; a short little one with rose posies, discovered at the Porte de Vanves flea market, for a sculpture entitled Slip of the tongue. "It was a mischievous little cup," Cotter explains. "It's so short, it's unambitious. It's a bit fuddy-duddy as well, because the roses are not exactly focused. I like objects that mimic objects. They're very modest. They're not very refined, but they mimic objects of refinement, ones that would be better made than themselves."
Cotter piled Lafarge plaster into the rose posy cup "in the way a child might play with their ice cream . . . That was a kind of very oral feeling." She added what might be interpreted as body parts: a bright yellow kidney or liver, a hot pink lipstick or nipple. "It had that feeling of being intimately connected with some interiority of the body," she admits.
Lafarge plaster, a stone composite that is 20 times harder than normal plaster, is one of Cotter's favourite sculpting materials. Sometimes it looks like melted candles. At other times it appears to have been moulded by hand. "I don't actually touch it," she explains. "I get it to the right kind of temperament. Sometimes it's very flowing. Sometimes it gets a bit angry and fraught, or it wrinkles. I can use it at the point that I like . . . I pour it, and it hardens."
Cotter's coffee cup period has not been dictated by Paris's status as cafe capital of the world, but by philosophical musings. "I felt the cup was a territory of crisis," she explains. "Extrusions from the mouth, conversation and articulation are major arteries through which we communicate with the world. So I saw it as something deeply psychological."
By filling her coffee cups with Lafarge plaster extrusions resembling ectoplasm (in the 19th century, emanations from the bodies of mediums) she has, she says, "imparted or implanted dysfunction and or angst into the cup".
Cotter has almost exhausted the cup cycle and is about to move on to "another scale of engagement". Yet, despite the ever-changing themes and styles, there is a continuity in her oeuvre. "I see all of my one-person shows as being connected with one quest, with one pursuit of the same problem in different ways: the whole question of our consciousness and material bodies in the material world, how those relationships play out," she explains.
Without pretence, Cotter explains her work by quoting Vilém Flusser, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein, all European philosophers who died in the second half of the 20th century.
Cotter was profoundly influenced by Merleau-Ponty's The Primacy of Perception. His description of "the interior and the exterior world, and the internalisation of the exterior, and the transformation of information in the subconscience and the conscious mind, and how one processes it and how one is phenomenologically connected to everything" instantly rang true for her. "This is a very important foundation to my work," Cotter continues. "This notion that one isn't exactly thick-skinned as much as thin-skinned, that one is in a state of interconnection with everything. Merleau-Ponty describes our psychic, conscious relationship with the world as one of such depth and interconnection."
COTTER'S OBSESSION with the boundaries - or lack thereof - between physicality and consciousness informs all her work. She wants, she says, to cast doubt on the world as we think we know it, and on our understanding of ourselves. Mirrors are a favourite theme "because mirrors prompt one to consider another reality, another parallel world that runs alongside the real one".
A prolific artist, Cotter says she was "always in a hurry, a bit driven . . . I think one of the more essential realities is material. I find discovering the nature of material and how it behaves spatially and how we interact with it is fundamental." She worries that 20 or 30 more years may not be sufficient for her to explore all her ideas. She started early, as a child in Wexford, making "Aladdin's boxes" from cheese containers, and frightening her family with a dressmaker's model she disguised and propped on a bed.
Though she is deeply attached to her home, husband and studio in Shandon, Cork, Cotter says a recent Arts Council travel grant to New York, and the residency in the Irish College in Paris, has helped her. "I can see that my work has reached certain points of clarity and then delved back down into a different layer of the problem," she says.
In Paris, Cotter made frequent visits to the Louvre, where she filled a sketch book with details of masterpieces, always copying the part where she thought the energy was concentrated. "Paris is interesting because of its historicity," she says. "I keep thinking of it as a pool that creates this sensation of a city that is quite liquid, but has packages woven together, private possession locked into systems. I like testing my ideas on a city like Paris, that has a very different sensory structure to New York."
While "trawling" through bric-a-brac shops in the rue d'Alésia, Cotter found a narrow, mirror-studded console table which she transformed into a work of art entitled Console with objects that are no longer themselves.
"I lost a night's sleep over this one," she says laughing at her purchase of the table. "It doesn't matter; I just had to have it. It's a reproduction. It's been a long time since I saw an object that displayed so arrogantly its lack of function, with such ambition. It's to hold things, but when you look in, it holds them on the thinnest of transparent glass. It promises something, and then there's a void at its centre."
After haggling down the price in French she learned at the Alliance Francaise, Cotter added Lafarge plaster extrusions from coffee cups to the top of the console. She discovered that "what this one had to offer was its haunted shadow" and replicated one of the extrusions beneath the console in plaster. Its image, seen through the glass, mixes with the reflected images of other objects on top of the console. "There's a cluster of things that exist and things that are shadows of things that exist," Cotter explains.
For Cotter, Console with objectsis a paradigm of the human condition. She says she's trying to show that "things are not fixed within their boundaries. They harbour other energies. They are hosts to other growths and things. There's a kind of complex of parallel existences."
Cotter made Welcome to other forms of propagationfrom a gold tea-set, Lafarge plaster, a mirrored table and yellow plastic vertebrae from a dinosaur kit she bought in London. "It is the most decorative piece," she admits. "I try to keep it more biomorphic than decorative. I try to avoid it, but obviously there's some point at which I just kind of enjoy it."