Seán Cotter creates arresting works of art that invite us to go beyond the image as spectacle, as Niamh NicGhabhann Coleman discovers
Seán Cotter is part of a group of contemporary artists whose work engages explicitly with climate breakdown. His exhibition ‘Boulder Milt’ shows the evolution of ideas across his body of work over the past decade. It includes works from his ‘Story Etching’ series (2016), which used flowing calligraphic text, to his more recent works, which combine oil on canvas with curved lead. This script that floats across the surface in earlier works becomes lines, often barely legible, etched into painted surfaces in later ones. Cotter’s practice has become more and more sculptural, with dense surfaces built up with paint. The lead-and-canvas assemblages move this into another realm, with triptych works created by bolting canvases into unfurled lengths of metal.
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