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Writing

The Permanence of Trees

Flash memoir, Sea Wolf Journal, 6 March

2025

In our neighbor’s yard, three landscape gardeners are unrolling rolls of lawn grass. The dark topsoil will soon be covered, and a garden will have been recreated in a space of three days, complete with sapling trees, a series of flowering bushes and two oversized planters that add color to the patio area adjoining the house.

The garden has lain waste for eleven months, ever since a freak tornado first since felled its trees. The old garden disappeared in one day. The new garden appeared almost as quickly. Soon it will look like there had never been something else there, just as it does in our own garden, whose toppled trees have been replaced with shrubs and saplings and a lawn shaped with a convoluted edging.

But it will never feel like home again, the canopy-less football field-like yard making it impossible to go outside in the burning summers, the oversized branch that had shaded my home office window now absent; inside is now a sweat-drenched sauna. “Trees of Heaven. Shallow rooted,” the maintenance company had complained, chain-sawing the lumber of their trunks.

Soon after, we move across town, leaving our first US rented home. Biden’s election win gives us the reassurance we need that we can truly stay. We buy a cheaper house with a gigantic Douglas Fir outside the front door. Twice as high as the roof, it must be 150 years old or more, and I picture its roots burrowed deep within the earth. “I hope you shoot down roots,” my yoga teacher had said, calling after me as we exited for the US. I felt ambivalent, never wanting to be rooted anywhere, but Portland felt different. I knew there was a chance.

A year after moving into our own home, the sewer repair company said they needed to dig an alternative route, chalking up a line two foot from the Fir’s trunk. They assured me the tree would be fine, but I asked them to stop the work while we contemplated our decision. A few days later, I stood with a senior tree consultant, staring up through the branches. He confided that although trees are expected to follow the same logic in how they grow and behave, they are in fact unpredictable, with roots taking detours and making decisions that could not have been foreseen. “Doug Firs are shallow rooted trees,” he told me, and I looked at him incredulously. “They cast a wide net, but their roots are shallow.”

Everyone thought we were staying for good when we bought our Portland home, but sometimes permanence is shallow rooted, it seems. Four years later, I am feeling uprooted again, in the aftermath of another freak tornado, different in kind, but just as unpredictable for us as “permanent residents” without citizenship. Is it time to pull up our roots and cast our nets more widely or dig deep and hope this storm will blow over, the willow-wisp funnel cloud disappearing into the future?


Writing

Lucy Cotter is a prolific writer of art criticism, cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, art history, art theory, ficto-theory, poetry, exhibition, dance, performance, and cross-disciplinary texts. She often experiments with the generative relationship between art-making and writing processes, allowing the subject to shape the form of her writing.

She is the author of Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019, expanded 2nd ed. 2024), a book foregrounding the singular nature of artistic thinking in dialogue with acclaimed artists worldwide. She is a regular contributor to books on contemporary art and culture by academic presses and has published in catalogues and monographs on Haegue Yang, Rabih Mroué, Katarina Zdjelar, Manuela Infante, and Brian O’Doherty, among other artists.

She is the editor of several exhibition catalogues, including Cinema Olanda: Wendelien Van Oldenborgh for the 57th Venice Biennale, and has guest-edited a number of art journals, including MaHKUscript Journal for Arts Research and Third Text. Her art critical writing has appeared in Flash Art, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Oregon Artswatch, CARA, Field Day, and Frieze. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have been published in Typishly, Cirque, The Brooklyn Rail, Sea Wolf and Mousse Magazine, among other journals. She is an alum of Tin House and Corporeal Writing, Portland.

Books

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research: Expanded Second Edition

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    Expanding the original book with additional artist dialogues and a new essay, this edition explores the changing stakes of artistic research in a world reckoning with social justice, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence through a series of 24 in-depth dialogues with artists worldwide.

    2024

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    In twenty conversations with leading artists worldwide, Lucy Cotter maps out an epistemology of artistic creation. She manifests a type of research that is dynamically engaged with other fields, but thinks beyond concepts into bodily and material knowledge that exceeds language, revolutionizing our perception of art from the ground up.

    2019

Books in Progress

Books Chapters & Essays

  • Haegue Yang: Day and Night

    Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness

    Fergal Gaynor, ed.

    Cork: National Sculpture Factory

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Global Engagement and Modalities of Looking: Brian Maguire, Richard Mosse, and Yuri Pattison

    Routledge Companion to Irish Art

    Fionna Barber and Fintan Cullen, eds.

    London: Routledge

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • unraveling: practice-led curating

    Companion to Curatorial Futures

    Bridget Crone, Bassam el Baroni, Matthew Poole, eds.

    Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

    forthcoming 2025
    2025

  • Delegitimizing the Continuum of Violence

    Brian Maguire: The Grand Illusion

    Dublin: The Hugh Lane National Gallery

    2024

  • Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge

    Manuela Infante: Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking

    Giovanni Aloi, ed.

    Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

    2023

  • The Warp and Weft of History

    Kristina Benjocki: The Warp and Weft of History

    Amsterdam: Looiersgracht 60

    2023

  • Fact as Fiction: A Dialogue with Rabih Mroué

    Rabih Mroué: Interviews

    Nadim Samman, ed.

    Berlin: Hatje Cantz

    2023

  • Braiding: Transgenerational Artistic Comradeship

    Katarina Zdjelar (monograph)

    Middlesborough: Institute of Modern Art & Teeside University

    2022

  • (tropisms) away from and towards the thing, it, she

    Natasha Pike (artist's book)

    Dublin: Arts Council

    2022

  • Beyond the Walls of National Identity: The Triangulation of Art Criticism, Curatorial Discourse, and Artistic Practice

    Irish Art 1920–2020: Perspectives on Change

    Yvonne Scott and Christine Kennedy, eds.

    Dublin: Royal Hibernian Academy

    2022

  • Between and Beyond the Dramaturgical

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • The Space Beyond Boundaries (On Rosie Heinrich)

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • Walking the Wrinkled Plane

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • Preparing for Liquefaction

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • The Accidental Symbol: Performance as a Conduit

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • After a While, Reflectively: Performing an Ecology of Composition Practice

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS Publishing/University of the Arts.

    2021

  • The Body as a Crease of Knowledge

    Fieldings, Sher Doruff, ed.

    Amsterdam: DAS, University of the Arts

    2021

  • Art Stars and Plasters on the Wounds: Why Have There Been No Great Irish Artists?

    Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader

    Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy, eds.

    Cork: Cork University Press

    2021

  • Unknowing Culture

    Persistent Traces of Things to Come

    Marjoca de Greef and Anastasija Pandilovska, eds.

    Amsterdam: Sun and Stars

    2020

  • Mercurial States

    e-flux Education

    2019

  • Towards an autonomy of self, towards a community of self

    Katarina Zdjelar: Vladimir

    Lucerne: Centre of Contemporary Art

    2019

  • Cinema Olanda: Toward a Platform, Realized and Anticipated

    Blessing and Transgressing: A Live Institute

    Defne Ayas, ed.

    London: Cornerhouse

    2018

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Aspen 5+6

    Brian O Doherty/Patrick Ireland: Word, Image and Institutional Critique, ed. Christa Maria Lerm Hayes. Amsterdam: Valiz

    2017

  • Cinema Olanda: Projecting the Netherlands

    Cinema Olanda: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, ed. Lucy Cotter, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, p. 11–21

    2017

  • Between the White Cube and the White Box: Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6, An Early Exposition

    The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia

    Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, eds.

    Leiden: Leiden University Press.

    2014

  • Close Listening: Katarina Zdjelar’s My lifetime (Malaika)

    Katarina Zdjelar: Of More Than One Voice

    Vitoria-Gasteiz: Artium Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art

    2013

  • 180 Degrees: The University after Artistic Research

    Art Education: A Glossary

    Tom Vandeputte, ed.

    Amsterdam: Sandberg Institute

    2013

  • Libia Olafur: The Future of Hospitality

    Under Deconstruction: Icelandic Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale

    Ellen Blumenstein, ed.

    Berlin: Sternberg Press

    2011

The above contributions are selected from 2011–2025. A list of selected earlier publications from 2005–2010 is available on request.

Journals

  • Water, Smoke, and Words: Patricia Vázquez Gómez's Ode to Indigenous Language

    Exhibition review, Oregon Artswatch, April 1

    2025

  • The Permanence of Trees

    Flash memoir, Sea Wolf Journal, 6 March

    2025

  • TBA Review: FORCE! an opera in three acts

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    11 September 2024
    2024

  • St. Louis Girls, 1957

    Poetry, Cirque, Vol 14, no, 2, p. 115

    2024

  • The Ingenious Multiplicity of Brian O’Doherty

    Tribute article, memorial publication,

    The Brooklyn Rail.

    02 May 2023
    2023

  • Empathy and Eros: Ralph Pugay’s The Longest Journey

    Exhibition review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    11 December 2023
    2023

  • The Weft of History: Kristina Benjocki at IKOB, Eupen

    Exhibition review, Metropolis M

    1 June 2022
    2022

  • The Promise of “Opacity”: Takahiro Yamamoto’s Opacity of Performance at Portland Art Museum

    Performance review, Oregon Arts Watch

    24 June 2022
    2022

  • Disintegrating Language: Will Rawls’s “Amphigory”

    Exhibition Review, Oregon Arts Watch.

    23 November 2022
    2022

  • Brian O’ Doherty, Paradigm-Shifting Artist Dies at 94

    Tribute article, Hyperallergic.

    9 November 2022
    2022

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay, RUUKU Journal for Artistic Research, Vol. 14

    6 August 2020
    2020

  • The Art of Zoom

    Essay: “The Art of Zoom”, republished, In the Pause of an Echo, There May Be A Shadow, online symposium publication.

    2020

  • Mia Habib, ALL – a physical poem of protest

    Performance review, Flash Art

    27 September 2019
    2019

  • An Intimate Dance of Objects: Gordon Hall

    Exhibition review, Mousse Magazine

    11 June 2019
    2019

  • Rob Halverson, Enthusiastic-Remotest-Tree

    Exhibition review, Flash Art

    5 June 2019
    2019

  • The Exhibition after Time and Space: On Mario Garcia Torres’s Survey ‘Illusion brought Me Here’

    Essay, Mousse Magazine

    Spring 2019
    2019

  • Design as Relationality, Aesthetics as Agency

    Essay, Sophie Krier, ed. Issue 4, Field Essays.

    2019

  • Wendelien van Oldenborgh at CA2M, Madrid

    Exhibition Preview, Artforum, Summer edition (print and digital).

    2019

  • Beyond the White Cube: Sixty Years of Brian O’ Doherty’s Letters

    Book review, Frieze.

    25 February 2019
    2019

  • Plants as Other: Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine

    17 May 2019
    2019

  • Becoming the Archive: A Dialogue with Euridice Kala

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Reclaiming Artistic Research… First Thoughts

    Essay, MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1, 2018

    2018

  • Knowledge as Production: A Dialogue with Liam Gillick

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Pockets of Continuity

    Poetry, Typishly, August 27

    2018

  • The Afterlife of the British Museum

    Fiction, Mousse Magazine, 11 July 2018

    2018

  • Writing as Experiment: A Dialogue with Sher Doruff

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1, 2018

    2018

  • Black Urban Choreography: NIC Kay’s Pushit!

    Performance Review, Mousse Magazine.

    26 October 2018
    2018

  • Beyond Language: A Dialogue with Falke Pisano

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1.

    2018

  • Sound as Knowledge: A Dialogue with Samson Young

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

  • Research as Play: A Dialogue with Ryan Gander

    MaHKUscript Journal for Fine Art Research, Vol (3), Issue 1

    2018

The above contributions are selected from 2018–2025 only. A list of selected earlier publications from 2003–2017 is available on request.

The keys of a computer are not entirely different than those of a piano. Fingers moving across a plane, producing sounds that are spoken or read. Tracing how material and embodied sensibilities can undermine the imposition of language; how words can act as placeholders for emerging subject positions and worldmaking. Embraced as a medium, writing aligns itself with the internal logic of art making.