LUMINOUS VISIONS: ANDREA COTE

LUMINOUS VISIONS: ANDREA COTE by Galina KurlatJuly 18, 2025

This week on Lenscratch, we look at a selection of artists creatively engaging with analog photographic processes within their practice.

In her project To Belong to the World, Andrea Cote engages directly with elements of nature and the body to create a series of site-specific cyanotypes. These large-scale prints incorporate strands of hair, fingerprints, and body casts alongside foraged materials gathered from the grounds of the exhibition site. Through this intimate layering of human and natural traces, the work explores themes of presence, impermanence, and the interconnectedness between the body and the landscape it inhabits.

By taking apart and reassembling elements of her own body, Cote re-contextualizes the self as a collection of parts rather than a unified whole. The body merges with natural forms, and—much like gazing at the night sky—the resulting prints evoke galaxies and constellations. In this way, To Belong to the World becomes both a personal and cosmic meditation on what it means to exist within and as part of the natural world.

Instagram: @andreacoteart

Website: www.andreacote.com

Andrea Cote is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, printmaking, installation and performance. Based In Hampton Bays, she has exhibited her work in North and South America at venues including Islip Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Abrons Arts Center, The Print Center, The Moore Gallery, Guild Hall and PanAmerican Art Projects. Her performances have been featured at The Watermill Center, The Neuberger Museum, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, The Peekskill Project, Chashama, The Dumbo Arts Festival, and Photo Buenos Aires. In 2012 a 13-year survey, “Body of Evidence,” was presented at Dowling College.

She is the recipient of several grants including NYSCA Creative Individuals Grants in 2014 and 2018 and a SIP Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. She received a NYSCA Artist Support Grant with the Patchogue Arts Council for a community project for 2023. She recently completed two projects for Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY – one as the featured artist of the 2024 Road Show at Bridge Gardens, followed by a Visiting Artist Initiative culminating in an installation at the museum including over 150 local participants, “The Nature of Humanity.”

The throughline in my work is the human body as a vessel for perceiving and processing experience. My feminist approach embraces all of our parts – from the visible to the most private. Deconstructing my physical self, I reassemble fragments into a range of forms through photographic and print-based media.

A signature of my work for decades has been the use of body parts as implements – drawing and painting with hair clippings, sculpting and printmaking with fingerprints and cast impressions of ears, noses, breasts, and labia. Participatory projects invited diverse individuals to contribute impressions of their bodies to communal installations. Those human collaborations have evolved to engage the natural environment. I invite visitors to question: Where does my body end and nature begin? My work aims to mend this disconnection.

The photographic media that documented earlier performances is foregrounded in my cyanotypes. This new series invokes the legacy of artist and botanist Anna Atkins, whose groundbreaking 1840s cyanotypes captured algae and ferns. I contemporize this technique by layering plant specimens with distinctive body-generated markings on acetate that act as negatives when exposed to light. These constellations inscribe time and space with a mortal presence.

My recent project “To Belong to the World,” was featured in Parrish Art Museum’s 2024 Road Show at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton, NY. The site-specific installation complemented the gardens with twelve large cyanotypes printed on fabric and mounted on bamboo sourced onsite. Throughout the previous year, I collected plant life from the Gardens – pressed flowers, leaves, branches – and interlaced these with imprints of human body parts and inked hair to create celestial and cellular patterns. These constellations inscribe time and space with a mortal presence.

In the central installation, a compass of banners encircled the formal rose garden. I exposed specimens from each season to the sun on cosmic milestones throughout the year, beginning on begun on the Winter Solstice and culminating onsite mid-exhibition with the Autumn Equinox. Drawing a line from sky to soil, my body becomes a channel, seeking deeper alignment with nature’s cycles.

© Andrea Cote, “As Below, So Above” (Rose Garden Installation) 2024, 8 Cyanotypes on cotton fabric, 18′ x 64′ x 64′. Cyanotypes exposed on cosmic milestones from Winter Solstice 2023 – Autumn Equinox 2024. Site-specific installation at Bridge Gardens