Biography
Marion Coutts is an artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, Chisenhale Gallery, London, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Foksal Gallery, Warsaw. She has held fellowships at Tate Liverpool and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge and was a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome.
In 2016 she was a Cove Park Literature Resident in Scotland and in 2018, the recipient of The Islands Arts Writing Residency on Fogo Island, Newfoundland. In 2019 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. She is a Reader in Art at Goldsmiths and lives in London.
She is currently working on a second book, What did the Deep Sea Say? The book is structured around the relationship between a parent and a child as they travel between sites around the Atlantic. It explores measures of distance: conceptual, temporal, emotional and physical, with a focus on the ocean and its edges, islands as metaphorical and physical constraints and coastlines as sites of flux and change. The writing combines fictional and non-fictional elements with other transdisciplinary approaches: creative, critical, lyrical and the text is formed around a set of photographs of the sea and coastal rock formations taken on Fogo Island.
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Links
Care and Waiting was an event that took place as part of the 2021 Critical Poetics Summer School, organised by the Critical Poetics Research Group at Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary.
http://www.criticalpoetics.co.uk/care-and-waiting-marion-coutts-in-conversation-with-laura-salisbury-29-june-2021/
Simple: carving from a bar of Simple soap made for The Spritual Exercises 2, an online exhibition organised by Arts Chaplaincy projects (UAL) during the COVID pandemic.
https://artschap.com/projects/marion-coutts/
This is from Dwight Garner, in a review of The Iceberg in the New York Times, 2016:
Ms. Coutts writes like she sings, which is to say her tone is not beautiful or especially rich, but prickly and a bit wild. She places little value on being likable. Amid shelves of soft and self-consciously therapeutic illness memoirs, this quality makes "The Iceberg," her first book, very likable indeed.
"The Iceberg" … lands with real and unconventional force. Its cover should be stamped this way: "Contains not one glib sentence."
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/books/review-a-widow-documents-her-loss-in-the-iceberg.html
Tread Softly. Works from the Arts Council Collection showing at YSP in 2017 exploring childhood, identity, and family relationships.
https://www.meer.com/en/26635-tread-softly
Marion Coutts: Aiming or Hitting, Tintype Gallery, London, March 10 - April 13 2017
Andrew Solomon, the writer and academic whose books include Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon, writes about The Iceberg alongside Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air in the New York Times. The Iceberg came out in the US in 2016 with Grove Atlantic as a Black Cat paperback. It has a terrific cover by Chip Kidd which you can view here - http://lithub.com/the-iceberg/# - along with an extract from the book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/books/review/the-good-death-when-breath-becomes-air-and-more.html?_r=0
And from a medical humanities perspective… here’s a review of The Iceberg on the BMJ blog, by Liz Barry from the English and Comparative Literary Studies Department at the University of Warwick
http://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2015/01/09/the-reading-room-a-review-of-marion-couttss-the-iceberg/
While at Art College in Edinburgh Coutts co-founded the group Dog Faced Hermans. Between 1990-94 they were based in Amsterdam and toured extensively throughout Europe and North America. Here is a link to a short biog, not entirely accurate, with discography, written by Douglas Wolk.
http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=dog_faced_hermans
United Agents represents the writing of Marion Coutts and the estate of the late Tom Lubbock.
http://unitedagents.co.uk/marion-coutts
http://unitedagents.co.uk/tom-lubbock
Website of Tom Lubbock, with essays and information on books, journalism and collage and including a selection of images of his collage works for the Independent 1999 – 2004.
http://tomlubbock.com/