Kyle Cottier
Kyle Cottier (b. Louisville, KY 1993) is a sculptor. They hold a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, 2015 and attended the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn, 2014. They spent a year living in the Smoky Mountains from 2021-2022 as an Artist-In-Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts & Craft . Kyle's interdisciplinary practice blends traditional textile and woodworking techniques spanning sculpture, drawing, and performance. They create work informed by the convergence of the natural and made world, exploring the synthesis of personal and social transformations. Currently, Kyle is living and working as an artist in Knoxville, TN, (traditional territory of the Tsalagi peoples,) and is a 2025 MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Graduate Sculpture program.
Things come together and fall apart. Things come together again and fall apart again. My work gestures towards collapsing the borders between fixed realities and investigates the relationships of interdependency that bind them. Every arrangement of connection and every part of the whole is subject to a productive tension. Between fixed and flexible, construction and destruction, ruined and repaired, a transformation is taking place. Untethering as things retether. I choreograph spatial narratives that reveal a desire to rebuild the link between human consciousness and our natural environment. I draw upon cyclical themes like growth and decay inherent in nature as a system for processing personal and collective grief—the moment when things fall apart—and how we can view these cycles through a lens of healing.
Through a balance of negative space and form I’m constructing a tangible measure of absence. In combination with materials that have been used, consumed, and discarded, I’m exposing an uncompromising touch of mortality and the fragility of our relationship to the environment. My work calls attention to our momentary belonging on this planet—the space in between what is certain and unknown—deepening our thoughts of our human need to dwell and how we inhabit the earth.
