A New Exhibit Now On View at Plough Gallery
This exhibit will run through September 6th, ending with a closing reception and artist talk.
Closing Reception / Artist Talk
Saturday, September 6, 2025
5 PM - 7 PM
Meet & Greet with Kyle Cottier
Saturday, September 6, 2025
5 PM - 7 PM
Meet & Greet with Kyle Cottier
BIO
Kyle Cottier (b. 1993, Louisville, KY) is a visual artist based in Knoxville, TN. Their interdisciplinary practice merges traditional basketry and woodworking techniques with sculpture, installation, and photography. Through innovative installations, Kyle explores the intersections of the natural, constructed, and digital worlds, focusing on themes of transformation—both personal and societal.
Kyle holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati (2015) and attended the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn (2014). They are currently a third-year MFA candidate in sculpture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From 2021 to 2022, they were an Artist-in-Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in the Smoky Mountains.
Kyle was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, with their work featured in Sculpture Magazine. Their work was also included in The Museum for Art in Wood’s exhibition Vessel: Embodiment, Autonomy, and Ornament in Wood in Philadelphia. Recent exhibitions include Modular at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati. Kyle is currently developing a new body of work funded by Tri-Star’s Current Art Fund Project Grant.
STATEMENT
I am an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with wood and photography to create sculptural forms through the accumulation of thousands of small parts—modular units woven into larger structures. My process is rooted in repetition, weaving, and mending, guided by a logic of interdependence and preservation. These porous forms—often latticed and suspended in tension—serve as traces in the hotbed of memory, where what remains is shaped as much by absence as by presence. I approach memory as physical and provisional, a space continually unmade and rebuilt over time.
Traditional craft practices like basketry and vessel-making are central to my process, not only for their histories of containment, care, and survival, but for how they embody the relationship between form and thought. The vessel recurs in my work as a symbol of autonomy through craft—where skill becomes self-reliance—emphasizing that the value of the form lies not only in its emptiness, but in its potential to contain something meaningful. My sculptures often revolve around a central emptiness, echoing the movement of my own body in their making and referencing the liminal space between ruin and repair.
I am drawn to systems of connection—between the organic and synthetic, body and landscape, online and offline. I map these blurred boundaries through tactile, handmade forms that honor the labor of making while questioning how we engage with materiality in a digitized world. My work prioritizes non-binary solutions—structures that hold rigidity and fluidity at once, remaining open, responsive, and unresolved, held together piece by piece.
Kyle Cottier (b. 1993, Louisville, KY) is a visual artist based in Knoxville, TN. Their interdisciplinary practice merges traditional basketry and woodworking techniques with sculpture, installation, and photography. Through innovative installations, Kyle explores the intersections of the natural, constructed, and digital worlds, focusing on themes of transformation—both personal and societal.
Kyle holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati (2015) and attended the New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn (2014). They are currently a third-year MFA candidate in sculpture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. From 2021 to 2022, they were an Artist-in-Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in the Smoky Mountains.
Kyle was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, with their work featured in Sculpture Magazine. Their work was also included in The Museum for Art in Wood’s exhibition Vessel: Embodiment, Autonomy, and Ornament in Wood in Philadelphia. Recent exhibitions include Modular at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati. Kyle is currently developing a new body of work funded by Tri-Star’s Current Art Fund Project Grant.
STATEMENT
I am an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with wood and photography to create sculptural forms through the accumulation of thousands of small parts—modular units woven into larger structures. My process is rooted in repetition, weaving, and mending, guided by a logic of interdependence and preservation. These porous forms—often latticed and suspended in tension—serve as traces in the hotbed of memory, where what remains is shaped as much by absence as by presence. I approach memory as physical and provisional, a space continually unmade and rebuilt over time.
Traditional craft practices like basketry and vessel-making are central to my process, not only for their histories of containment, care, and survival, but for how they embody the relationship between form and thought. The vessel recurs in my work as a symbol of autonomy through craft—where skill becomes self-reliance—emphasizing that the value of the form lies not only in its emptiness, but in its potential to contain something meaningful. My sculptures often revolve around a central emptiness, echoing the movement of my own body in their making and referencing the liminal space between ruin and repair.
I am drawn to systems of connection—between the organic and synthetic, body and landscape, online and offline. I map these blurred boundaries through tactile, handmade forms that honor the labor of making while questioning how we engage with materiality in a digitized world. My work prioritizes non-binary solutions—structures that hold rigidity and fluidity at once, remaining open, responsive, and unresolved, held together piece by piece.
