Addy Cota (b. 1997 in Louisville, Kentucky) is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting, and installation.
My work examines identity and embodiment through sculptural assemblages that take the form of abject ambiguous artifacts. They are tactile and materially unstable. Forms accumulate through soft and hard materials, hand-sewn elements, organic details, and unfinished forms. I use these contrasts to make objects that can feel both strange and beautiful.
I work intuitively. To connect with my Appalachian background and the domestic labor of the women who came before me, i begin each piece without a fixed plan, following a strong need to make, and using materials such as raw wool, wax, and hand sewing. The process reaches toward something instinctive inside of myself, and using these materials gives me a way to approach that history on my own terms. This way of working leaves behind simple marks, with some areas carefully built and detailed, while others are left unresolved. This reflects my own imperfect relationship to my own womanhood and identity, as well as the traumas that have shaped that experience.
Less concerned with making a perfect finished work, i impulsively manipulate material with what comes forward in me, and the work becomes instinct in that process. I am interested in how trauma and identity are held in the body, but do not attempt to explain my own trauma directly. Instead, each piece becomes an artifact of the process of making.