Claire Coté
Questa, NM
Both Many and One
Cyanotype, repurposed tea bags, black tea and matte medium
29.5” x 19” x 1.5”
2023
$900
About
Claire Coté is a multi-passionate artist, mother, off-grid homemaker and director of LEAP and Questa Stories. As an artist and curator, Claire has worked with the US National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, as well as the Global Geoparks Network on commissions, residencies and site-based environmental artworks and events. Claire holds a B.A. in Studio Art and Cultural Anthropology from University of New Mexico and an M.A. in Art and Ecology from Dartington College of Art, England. In 2009, she founded the environmental art initiative LEAP (Land Experience and Art of Place) and in 2018, co-founded Questa Stories: Voices of the Northern Rio Grande.
Artist Statement
I create abstract and figurative cyanotype prints, drawing-paintings and mixed media works that reflect the natural world and daily life around me. Repurposed materials, cyanotype, water color, pigment pen, black tea and botanical forms coalesce in layers on paper, fabric, wood and panel. The materials I use, the place where I’m working, and the elements present - sun, wind, rain, snow, plants, earth or my boisterous daughters - become collaborators in an intuitive making process. The piece in this show is part of my sky-quilt series; it is a flag to process acknowledging life’s weathering, aging, renewal and resilience. It is both individual and community. It is thoughts during meditation and wholeness when we let them go. It is rupture and repair. It is both many and one; it is neither one nor many. Made from used tea bags, rerouted from the compost bin, the piece is collaged with matte medium, painted with black tea, coated with cyanotype emulsion, then exposed to the sun. The delicacy of the material speaks to impermanence, fragility of life, preciousness of the form we have and opportunities it offers.
