by Tiarney Miekus

British artist Eden Kötting is creating a new series of paintings. On a black background — a startling colour choice that provides her tangling, expressive style with an enhanced vividness — she has composed several self-portraits of great movement, many featuring a flower garland adorning her head. Tellingly, these energetic paintings, which feature recurring motifs like flowers, butterflies and fish, flow like a dance or a skip. It soon makes sense that their origins are performative, related to the English ‘Jack in the Green’ tradition.

Eden Kötting, This Is The House That Jack Built. Courtesy the artist. Image: A Kötting. — Eden Kötting, *This Is The House That Jack Built.* Courtesy the artist. Image: A Kötting.

In the historical version of this folkloric tale, which began in the late 18th century, a person dresses inside a ten-foot-high tent covered in foliage and parades themselves. Yet more localised and contemporary resurrections, the kind that Kötting participates in, see women in flowing dresses, garlands adorning their bodies, glowing in a haze of flowers. Kötting, who paints from both observation and intuition, captures the movement of this parade, understanding the fun and play of spectacle, and communicates this through pictorial space.

With a practice almost two-decades-long, Kötting works across painting, drawing, animated drawing, performance, collage, artist books and video. Creating from a young age, she first began working with found images and words — pairing seemingly non-corresponding material to make meaning — and her poetic and humorous use of language, across all of her art, is particularly compelling.

In the aforementioned portraits, Kötting has included phrases like, “Againness begets againness”, “To find some outstanding words”, “Aftermath of wakefulness” and “The man mountain is asleep whilst all around hope hides”. In another painting from a different series, Kötting, in a near-surrealist style, painted an abstract sea with a black background, with sparse lines indicating water (as Kötting is visually impaired, the darker backgrounds are easier to paint against). It features the words “Devoid of meaning”: it feels genuinely existential. At other times, the language simply amusing. “Bloody butterflies,” says another artwork.

Yet Kötting’s words do not come from her directly: they are borrowed from the films and writings of Kötting’s father, Andrew Kötting, a well-known filmmaker and artist. The pair have a relationship beyond familial: Kötting and Andrew are life-long artistic collaborators, influencing, creating and performing with one another across a plethora of art forms, for almost 25 years. Kötting isn’t aware of the precise meaning of the phrases and images that she borrows from Andrew, but she understands their reception from those around her, and they are emblematic of her fluid collaboration with her father.

In addition to working with Andrew multiple days a week, for the last 17 years, Kötting has worked each Wednesday at Project Art Works in Hastings, a collective of neurodiverse artists and activists. Her main practice at the studio is painting, and she is precise: she uses felt tip pens to layout the images, which are filled in with acrylic by brush, the canvas upright in front of her. This process can take weeks; Kötting is not in a hurry. Yet when Kötting is working with Andrew, the process is quickened, working fast across canvas and paper using magic markers; it is a haptic, almost kinetic way of creating, juxtaposed against the precision of the painting at Project Art Works. Kötting regularly exhibits her paintings and has had four solo shows in England, one in France, and regularly shows and performs alongside Andrew.

Eden Kötting, Courtesy the artist and Project Art Works.

Within these paintings is a penchant for still life, where Kötting, in her own abstracted, colourful style, depicts objects like wine, bottles, fruit and bread. Sometimes these still life paintings are rendered from what Eden sees before her, other times it becomes more experimental. “We enjoy subverting them [the still life paintings] with the introduction of things like chainsaws, air rifles, dead animals and shoes,” explains Andrew. “Eden has a great sense of the absurd.” While the still life form has been known for being either a celebration or warning of material existence or a formal inquiry into the metaphysical properties of objects — Eden has no such remit.”

Eden Kötting, Still Life with Veg, 2010/2011, painting on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Project Art Works. — Eden Kötting, *Still Life with Veg*, 2010/2011, painting on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Project Art Works.

To my observation, Kötting’s paintings align more with a still life tradition in which the painting becomes allegorical or metamorphic for life. Even though she has no conscious underlying subtext, her ability to distil forms between the figurative and abstract captures the movement, the sheer flux, of what appears to be still or dead life. Her paintings of fruit and vases are rendered with such kinetic energy that instead of showing life as silent and frozen, Kötting gives us incompleteness — and it’s the freezing of this incompleteness that becomes important.

With Andrew and Kötting’s mother artist Leila McMillan, Kötting lives and works between Hastings and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the French Pyrenees. When I spoke with Kötting and Andrew at a new studio in St Leonards-on-Sea, the pair told me how they generally worked together on Saturdays and Sundays, but with the impact of Covid-19, had extended to four days per week. In a large, light space, overflowing in the way most artist studios are, there are fish sandwiches for lunch, and reggae, dub, Motown, or Nick Cave blasting away in the background.

In 1996 when she was only 10 years old, Kötting first appeared in her father’s experimental feature film Gallivant, and was later part of a string of films by Andrew, including This Our Still Life, 2011. This latter film works like a contingency of images and sounds capturing Kötting, Andrew and Leila’s creative and familial life, invoking montage so that the film is more about the process of creating itself.

In addition, Kötting and Andrew have worked on animations such as Diseased and Disorderly, 2021 which uses her collages and images, and the pair were previously commissioned to create a three-minute film for Channel 4’s Random Acts. Andrew’s work has served as the prompt for innumerable paintings, drawings, and artist books, including This Illuminated World is Full of Stupid Men which features collaged images and words. Not to mention the pair documented their time in New Zealand by publishing images of themselves falling over in museum spaces, Kötting laughingly and unceremoniously splayed on the ground from her wheelchair. It’s conceptually laden and witty, yet naïve in the same moment.

Andrew takes care to emphasise this symbiotic connection between himself and Kötting, explaining, “The work she [Kötting] makes with me is usually thematically connected to the projects I’m working on. I refer to it as spillage and more often than not it is as much about what spills from her to me than me to her. I often wonder whether Eden might be ventriloquising me.” Andrew has documented their relationship, both in writing and in film, with great poetic acumen, exploring what it means to collaborate and care for a neurodivergent daughter, recognising that both art and providing care are unpaid labours of the heart. Within this is a compulsion to simply keep making, where limitations can grow exponentially, and the visual becomes an innate element of Kötting’s communication with the world.

Tiarney Miekus is a Melbourne-based writer who has published in The Age, Meanjin, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Art Guide Australia, Disclaimer, un Magazine, Swampland, Memo Review and more. She is the Editor and Podcast Producer at Art Guide Australia.

Eden Kötting is an artist supported by studio Project Art Works. She paints objects as still life as well as creating artwork from her imagination. She collaborates with her father, artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting, on numerous projects for cinema and gallery spaces, and has worked with him to produce a large body of work around themes of ‘Still Life’.

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