KATE COTCHING

UNINHABITABLE
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Front gallery

Celebrated for her intricate paper sculptures and installations, in 2003, Gertrude Contemporary was pleased to present Kate Cotching’s most ambitious project to this date. Using a precision-knife, Kate Cotching carefully and laboriously reduced sheets of hand-coloured paper into a decorative window display, illustrating a landscape. For the benefit of the bigger picture, millions of tiny incisions were made, and sections of paper selectively removed and discarded. It is a rather destructive, obsessive, even violent means of creation that cast a shadow on anything that lay around it. Mirroring Cotching’s papercut process was her conceptual focus. It examined the ways in which the landscape is subdivided, organised and shaped. Historical imagery of Melbourne merged with its present developed and industrialised state. The sustainability of such constructed spaces is questionable, and their eventual collapse is imaginable and unsettling.

The winner of the 2002 Deacons Award at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Kate Cotching is a Melbourne-based artist who completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in painting at RMIT, 1997. Cotching is currently represented at the The Future in Every Direction: the Joan Clemenger Endowment for Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, and her work was recently acquired by the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery as a part of the gallery’s National Works on Paper award. Cotching has held numerous solo exhibitions including Platform 2, Melbourne 2002, and Searching for the Golden Egg, Penthouse and Pavement, Melbourne and Gallery 4A, Sydney 2001. Group exhibitions include Boogy Jive and Bop, Academy Gallery, Launceston 2003, Bus gallery, Melbourne 2002. Cotching undertook a studio residency at the Beijing Arts Academy, China, in 2001.