About
Luke Cotter and Hollie Wilkins – Tailing Amok
13/11/26 – 23/12/26
Preview: Friday 13th November 7pm
Rhagolwg: Dydd Gwener 13 Tachwedd 7yh
Gallery open Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm
Oriel ar agor Dydd Mercher – Dydd Sadwrn, 11yb – 5yp
Tailing Amok brings us into the worlds of Luke Cotter and Hollie Wilkins who for the last year have been based in a shared studio with Elysium Gallery as 2025 winners of the Graduate Award Residency, in collaboration with Swansea College of Art’s Fine Art: Studio Site and Context.
The studio has provided new challenges for the artists, a space where objects, processes and humour flow together creating two distinct, but supportive bodies of work.
Collaboratively we encounter a shared engagement with waste materials, scale and humour that comes with the sharing of a space, where ideas and found objects naturally cross-pollinate. Both artists playfully explore the ‘thing-ness’ of making, the farcical levels of relentless human production and sub-sequential discarding.
For several years Luke Cotter has developed a way of working underpinned by a unique approach to found materials. Street-combing for abandoned wooden furniture to create spaces and sculpture that questions what we need and desire through a complex relationship between people and labour. Utilising familiar, yet overlooked spaces like chapels, pubs and houses Cotter explores the intersection between personal and collective experience. Within this we see a rare focus and continuation of the Welsh storytelling tradition, here through the creation of Dyn, we are presented with tools made by a failed gold-prospector, relying on his luck but ultimately failing. This “throwaway name” has allowed Cotter to channel an alternative logic to making things that Dyn “thinks will work but they never quite get there”.
Hollie Wilkins creates sculptures that defy easy classification, working to an uncanny level of detail, often at odds to the throwaway materials they are made from. Discarded industrial plastic sheeting, pipe and rope have all been given intimate attention, where the artist has employed post-use waste management: like wire stripping to create objects that play with tension, density and torsion. By meticulous deconstruction, an onion net can, in turn, encourage us to ask questions about the physical manifestation of information. Here, Wilkins focus on the “aquatic” pierces the mechanisms of industrial systems around the industrial, where discarded plastics, bycatch and whale-fall holds up a mirror to our future not easily disregarded. Animals sustaining themselves from a fallen whale echoes in some way the creative processes employed by Wilkins, where works often have the appearance of being made by an anarchic species, woven by a bird that defies classification.
This studio collaboration offers a rich source of inspiration to both Cotter and Wilkins artistic practices, both exhibiting new and previously unseen bodies of work. And none of this would be possible without the support of Elysium who have championed early career artists since its foundation in 2007. Wales’s largest provider of artist studios, Elysium fosters a thriving community of artists and creatives that contribute to the development of Swansea’s wider cultural landscape.
Alex Duncan
About the artists
Based in South Wales, Luke Cotter (b.2004) creates sculptures from discarded wood salvaged from Swansea’s streets. Through the reconstruction of familiar objects, his practice investigates the complex relationships between people and tools.
Working with waste as both medium and subject, he employs recognisable forms to navigate how value is assigned, exposing the tensions between what we need and what we desire.
Hollie Wilkins’ (b.2003) foundation of methodology is found within a material-based, intuitive, art practice. Finding conceptual influence in the writings of Haraway (1944-), Murdoch (1919-1999) and Wittgenstein (1889- 1951), she utilises the once loved and well worked to critically consider concepts of cosmic scale and the movement of living knowledge.
Breaking down and examining ontological conceptions of ex/interiority through minutiae, collage and tactility, her work explores the synaptic undertakings taking place across chiral planes. Often seeking to combine elements of the ecological with the social through farce, desire and sediment in order to consider the changing transparencies of value and power.