Maud Cotter was born in Wexford in 1954 and graduated from the Crawford College of Art (Cork) in 1978. She is co-founder of the National Sculpture Factory and a member of Aosdana (2000). Cotter was based in London at the Delfina Trust (1992-1997) and completed a residency at the British Embassy in Luxembourg - Artists in Residence programme (1995). In 2000 she was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex Award. Cotter's work has featured in group exhibitions and solo projects in Europe and the United States since the early eighties, including 0044 Irish Artists in Britain 1999 and at PS -1 New York; A Measured Quietude at the Drawing Centre, New York. Her most recent one-person exhibition titled, ‘Not the Full Story’ was in the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin in January 2007 and in 2005 she exhibited solo projects both at Model Niland Gallery, Sligo and the Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno, Wales. In 2006 she was shortlisted for the inaugural Irish American Arts Awards, New York. She work has been presented at numerous International Art Fairs with Rubicon Gallery since 1999 and is represented in numerous collections in Ireland and Europe and in private collections in the United States.

'In using everyday objects and materials Cotter selects unfamiliar interfaces. She gives visual form to fragments of the small, intimate narratives and does not employ abstract materialism or formalism. 'the cats pyjamas' is in some respects similar to the language of Arte Povera. This encompasses in particular the simple artistic gesture, the use of frugal materials and the open combination of diverse fragments. Added to this are ordinary everyday objects, which bring their own history with them.' Angelika Richter, Werkleitz Gesellschaft E.V. Germany 2005.

’For Cotter, our domestic spaces are charged spaces; charged by the simple fact of our having used them and the objects they contain, often unthinkingly, day in, day out. The teacup that we lift to our lips each morning becomes, under Cotter’s eye, a repository for something strangely physical. It becomes a host for the accumulation of mood, feeling, emotion, secrets and stories of life, from the banal to the extraordinary.’ Gemma Tipton, 2007.

A repeated characteristic of the work is that it formally clusters or takes on the collective intelligence of a swarm through its many parts. Works, such as ‘More than anything’, and ‘I don’t know about that’ become collective forces, mechanisms that coalesce to form a way of invesigating the nature of matter, its use and abuse through overproduction.

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