Maelstrom | Maud Cotter at Highlanes Gallery

Event Details

Exhibition continues from 23rd August to 1st November 2025

A major solo exhibition by artist Maud Cotter maelstrom presents a group of works which seek to examine the complexity of the present, and engages with the complexity and form of change as process, with works that reference the dual directionality of time, and the relational nature of matter.

This exhibition of large scale works by this established Irish artist responds to the complexity and spatial range of the site of Highlanes Gallery across its two floors.

Integrated into the exhibition is a stream of engagement with the historic and contemporary work from the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection.

Within the exhibition of new and recent large-scale sculpture and installation is the eponymous work – maelstrom which Maud Cotter describes as ‘a spiral, a whirling stream.’

She adds ‘this phenomenon I see as an expression of the nature of change, a complex form which expands and ingests space; a dual directional dynamic, ingesting spent form and offering a different conceptual direction.’

Writer and critic Rebecca Geldard has written recently on Cotter’s practice:

‘In Marcel Marceau’s stage routine, there is a perfectly choreographed moment of suspension that goes unnoticed by the audience, Maud Cotter explains. It serves to amplify the physicality of his feat, the ability to hold sinew and bone in time and freeze imperceptibly. But this is only noticeable in the wings, from where she draws him. Beyond the stage, the interruption of energy, of flow, appears to change nothing but, in fact, changes everything about the energy field. With the muscular elegance of the gymnast or the pervasive creep of a musical score, the slight shift in mood silently alters the parameters of what’s performatively possible.’

‘Interconnectedness, at the molecular level, is the driver of Cotter’s sculptural enquiry; manifesting moments of “imperfect geometry” at the core of where things, beings, ideas and environments meet. Whether daring to ‘draw’ this massively in metal, manufacture it through the placement of pre-existing materials, or orchestrate the essential bits in between, any sense of artistic coercion is only ever, and oh so lightly, custodial, however hands-on the process. Each fixing, inscribed section, loop of archi-graphic script, is allowed to speak with its own energy as part of a quietly insistent ensemble cast, leading us beyond the need for meaning and on towards a collective sense of being in the thick of it – soaring, spiralling, feeling that all things seem to touch so they are.’