schurlpf, plynxe, fliombllsscc, are three sets of small watercolour paintings (6.3 x 9.5 cm). They were made following Coutts' attempts to simulate the experience of living in a body of water which involved spending time with her head in the bathroom sink, wading out of her depth in local ponds and lakes and beginning scuba diving lessons. She did this in response to a story about a dolphin locally named Kylie who left her own pod to live with a community of porpoises near the Port of Glasgow. To communicate with her much smaller companions she adjusted her voice box raising the register of the sounds she made in order to interact with the porpoise pod.
As for previous works such as 'See Nature' and 'Man Stupid', Coutts became interested in how it might be possible to get closer to a 'beyond human' ontology and morphology through an enduring everyday practice of acquiring gestures, behaviours and rituals from other than humans. In developing a language through its movement from one body to another, Coutts makes images in extension of this learning and transformative knowledge.
This work has recently been shown in the exhibition 'Gesticulator' at ASC Gallery, London (3rd February - 10th March 2023) curated by Vicky Sin, Jeroen van Dooren and Liz Murray. The exhibition looks to Giorgio Agamben, for whom gesture is neither straightforwardly image or symbol, but an ‘exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such’. However, nothing he claims, is ‘produced or acted’ within the gesture, only ‘endured and supported’, as the loss inherent therein, is directed towards the other.
This exhibition seeks to examine and problematise common cliches of the gesture - as something superficial, theatrical, or cursory for example, or something readily comprehensible as the mirror of language - taking Agamben’s simile of the gag as a point of departure (or challenge), through which to scrutinise the notion of a ‘pure and endless mediality’.
The exhibition will be developed into a book published by ASC in 2023.
