Traumatic Objects’ is a series of three large-scale drawings distinct from, but related to ‘Man Stupid’ (a former body of drawings and mixed media work). ‘Man Stupid’ was made in response to the captive gorilla Koko’s short sign language speech at the COP21 climate change conference in 2014. ‘Man Stupid’ is a line from her speech which also contains abbreviated basic instructions for humans such as ‘See Nature’ and ‘Fix Nature’. The traumatic image of a female gorilla trained to adopt a human mode of communication to convey the damage humans are doing to her species, all species and the natural environment, was approached by Coutts as a prompt to question the role of language and speaking, teaching and learning, authoritative and redundant bodies within climate crisis debates. Rather than attempting to capture, represent, or fix, the gorilla in the act of signing, instead the possibilities of articulating her visually are kept deliberately plural in ‘Traumatic Objects’. She is kept ‘live’ through rituals of repeat, through Coutts adopting and rehearsing Koko’s learnt and adapted signs in her studio, and through building embodied resistance to her image becoming archival or obsolete. Traumatic Objects is Coutts’s attempt, to enact in practice Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s memorable phrase in The Undercommons (2013), describing discursive subjecthood, and the space of the hold in slave ships, as “a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you.” (Moten, Harney) Whereas ‘Man Stupid’ involved multiple initial experiments across a range of media, ‘Traumatic Objects’ commits to an approach to drawing that combines the gestures that Koko made and the gorilla’s and Coutts’ morphology while doing so. ‘Traumatic Object 1’ recalls Koko’s shape and gravity as she sits to deliver the message she has been taught to sign. She has become a yellow mass ‘displayed’ on a blue support. Her animal surface has become planetary with fissures, outcrops, eruptions, plains, mottled and bruised areas. Multiple lines sprout and wind, point and break. ‘Traumatic Objects 2 & 3’ further obscure reminders of gorilla, foregrounding instead the signs that she learned and Coutts’ embodiment of them. There is a dissonance in the drawings between blocked out underpainted forms and floating patterns of intricate fine lines that follow a separate logic. There is no perfect position to view them from as the details can’t be seen from afar as the overall form can’t be seen from nearby. The work aims for a maximised openness and responsiveness towards the prompt of Koko and her presence within climate change discourses. It contributes alongside others working with “slow painting” and “slow drawing” to offer a method to what can feel like an overwhelming individually prohibitive global issue. It foregrounds a visual language in place of the complexities and implicit trauma of this interspecies interaction.

Josephine Berry has written extensively on ‘Traumatic Objects’ in the book ‘Planetary Realism (2025) Sternberg Press. Traumatic Objects’ has also been disseminated in a keynote speech by Coutts at the Fiction Feeling Frame Conference convened by the Architecture programme at the RCA (May 2022) through a paper delivered at the ‘Intergenerational Imagination Symposium’ across institutions at the Mayday Rooms (February 2022) and in a conference on fabulation at HDK Valand in Gothenburg, Sweden with a 5,000 word essay commissioned for the online peer reviewed publication PARSE (2025). It has been shown (in part or in full) in the exhibitions: ‘Flat’ at APT Gallery, London (curated by Catherine Ferguson, August 2022), ‘A Puff of Smoke to the Face’, Galeria Diferenca, Lisbon, Portugal (Curators: Theo Ereira-Guyer and Jorge Santos, Feb 2021) and will feature in its entirety in a solo show at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art in 2026.

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