Traumatic Objects’ is a series of three large-scale drawings that are distinct from, but relate to ‘Man Stupid’ (a former body of 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 the natural environment, was approached by Coutts as a prompt to relentlessly question how to convey her presence through a drawing practice. Rather than attempting to capture, represent, or fix, the gorilla in the act of signing, instead she holds the possibilities of articulating her visually plural. She is kept ‘live’ through rituals of repeat, through Coutts adopting and rehearsing Koko’s learnt and adapted signs in her studio, through resistance to her image becoming archival or obsolete. Whereas ‘Man Stupid’ involved multiple experiments across a range of media, Traumatic Objects commits to an approach to drawing at the endpoint of these explorations. 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 debates. It contributes a visual language in place of the complexities and implicit trauma of this interspecies interaction.

Traumatic Objects’ has been disseminated in a keynote speech at the Fiction Feeling Frame Conference convened by the Architecture programme at the RCA (9th May 2022) through a paper delivered at the ‘Intergenerational Imagination Symposium’ across institutions at the Mayday Rooms (February 2022) and has been shown (in part or in full) at three 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 ‘The Beholder’s Share’, Lokale, Copenhagen, Denmark (Curator: Stine Ljungdahl, 2019).

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