Séan Cotter is an Irish artist who lives in Cavan and is a graduate of National College of Art & Design, Dublin. Séan has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in Ireland and internationally.
Boulder Milt is his first solo show at Limerick city Gallery of Art (LCGA). Séan has been on many residencies in Iceland, Finland. These residencies have been a source of real concern about the way in which this planet, earth, is changing due to Climate Change. In the early weeks of January 2025 we witnessed the devastating impact on people, their lives and the landscape in California of the wild fires – the direct result of our disregard for nature and how this has led to catastrophic consequences.
Below are some extracts from an essay by Dr. Ciara Healy on Cotter’s work which will be included in a LCGA publication to be launched towards the beginning of March.
"In 2020, Séan Cotter walked across Iceland on a one-month artist’s residency, finding fragments of light on the Sólheimajökull Glacier. In this place, over thousands of years, ice has been compressed, losing almost all oxygen, forced out by intense pressure. This pure glacial ice, the colour of sapphires, reflects the blue colours of the light spectrum. On a nearby bay, a volcanic black sand beach is scattered with glacial ice from the lagoon—inky black and luminous gemstones marooned between time, melting in a bowl of clouds.
It is here that Cotter felt a bittersweet connection to the slowly vanishing white, hearing the groans of glaciers as they journeyed toward the sea. Their shrinking mass a stark symbol of environmental fragility, of memory and impermanence, themes that have long influenced his work.
Cotter’s experience of Iceland’s dynamic landscapes and the delicate, fractured ice beneath him, carried the weight of urgency: to capture these old worlds and the stories of our ancestors as they are extinguished one by one. In this collection of paintings, we see ourselves, with a shock, on this earth: suddenly inconsequential, irrelevant, and tiny.
In 2021, Cotter travelled to Spain and observed a 2,000-meter-high peak in the Málaga region engulfed by forest fires, which ultimately destroyed 7,000 hectares of land and led to the evacuation of 2,500 residents. The blaze prompted the use of seaplanes, running trips constantly back and forth from the sea to the burning mountain to drop water. Watching this event, helpless, underscored his sense of our vulnerability to nature, revealing the tenuous nature of our sense of control. The landscape’s destruction was a stark warning about the consequences of environmental neglect. Yet, despite so much clear evidence, political narratives continue to downplay the impact of climate change and instead continue to perpetuate known patterns of destruction”.
Ciara Healy is a lecturer at the Limerick School of Art & Design
LCGA publication to accompany Boulder Milt will be launched towards the end of March with other essay by Yvonne Scott.
Further information please contact artgallery@limerick.ie
