Dr Nicky Coutts is an artist, researcher and writer. She is currently Research Lead in the School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art having been PGR Research Lead, MRes Pathway Leader and Research Tutor in the School of Fine Art and Humanities at the Royal College of Art (2012-2022). She completed a PhD in Photography at the RCA in 2001 and was an Associate Lecturer in MA Photography at LCC (2011-2016), Postdoctoral Fellow at Middlesex University (2004-2009), Commissioning Editor of Make, Magazine of Womens’ Art (1998-2000) and Associate Editor of Coil, Journal of the Moving Image (1997-2001).
Her research focuses on the pressures that humans place on species diversity and the environment, and the role of cross-species interactions in finding a way to better interact and live. Through a writing and multi-disciplinary visual practice, she explores how ‘language’ is often used to sustain the status quo and the potential for this to be shifted through working closely with 'oddkin' (Haraway). Queer and feminist methods are deployed in Coutts’s work to disrupt the normative values that have led to some bodies, lives or communities being valued over others. Her research addresses the power structures that have facilitated the ‘othering’ of all ‘others’ experimenting with practices of inclusion in writing and making. Key to Coutts’ work is an interest in mimetic principals and their transformative potential between art and politics. Through her visual work and writing, she addresses how through spending time with and developing strategies of adaptive exchange with other species, it could become possible to ethically share in each other’s qualities and approaches to living and dying.
Her outputs include drawings, moving image works, photographs, prints, sculpture, academic texts and experimental writings. Coutts is also part of a fictions collective with former colleagues from the RCA. The group are evolving an interspecies, queer, critical scripting that takes the form of both publishing and exhibition. Other collaborations have included co-writing for an issue of the journal Photography and Culture for the Theatre of Photography Research Group. Coutts was PI for the project Future Print Story, a Daiwa Foundation and Great Britain Sasakawa funded collaboration with Tokyo University and Kyoto City University, involving print workshops and discussions of mimetic principals. Ongoing she works with Zoologists, Animal Behaviour specialists, Linguists, Actors and Actor Theorists on long term projects. Coutts shows her work internationally. Exhibitions and commissions include: Emscher Newtown Research Residency, (2017 Arts Council Wales, ADDO and Emscherkünst, Germany), Signature Artist, National Trust for Scotland and Creative Scotland in The Year of Natural Scotland (2014) and International Fellow at Kultur Steierrmark (2012). Coutts has also shown in venues such as Youkobo, Tokyo; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany and Fotografisk Center Copenhagen. She is represented by Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London with solo shows in 2018, 2015, 2011 and 2008.
