Valentine Cotte

Valentine Cotte’s work is a mesh in which sculpture, drawing, printmaking and performance coexist. In it she weaves a personal mythology at the crossroads of the Middle Ages and science fiction, and explores gendered power dynamics between autobiography and fiction.

She works with vulnerable materials: ceramic, porcelain, glass, lace, woven gauze. She diverts armor and chain mail to invert protection and combat, and to imagine works that are fragile, wounded, fallible. Her pieces are like shed skins that must be cared for, in a permanent performance of repair and resilience.

Through reappropriations of History from a queer and feminist perspective, she questions what society does to gendered and minoritized bodies, and offers emancipatory narratives at the margins of norms.