Claudine Cotton is a multi-disciplinary artist whose ‘works of poetic displacement’, in her own words, ‘privilege’ the strategies of performance art, installation and so-called ‘public manoeuvre’ in staging gentle interventions into the problematic separation between the private and the public, the familiar and the strange. For the past few years, these performances have focused increasingly on an investigation of human interaction and our encounters with others. Cotton creates occasions for such encounters, often using everyday situations or materials taken from the private sphere of domesticity and placing them into public spaces as a kind of friendly lure, which help her to establish connections with her accidental audience and persuade them to participate and engage. Her projects draw on our sense of personal and perceptual space, and the singularities and peculiarities that one may find here. In the past, Cotton positioned a bed in a shopping mall and invited passers-by to take a nap in public, asked complete strangers to place kisses on her naked back, and recorded the heartbeats of people she met on the street. With the lightest of touches Cotton thus creates situations of conviviality which help create an opening for communicating the true intention of her project: an exploration of the ways in which we interact with others and in which we are touched, even infiltrated by the people we encounter. These works have made her one of Québec’s foremost representatives of a ‘relational aesthetics’.

For RHWNT, Cotton will set up similarly simple and precise impromptu meetings in the streets, pubs, coffee houses and shopping malls of Cardiff. In French, the expression ‘se couvrir’ (‘to cover oneself’) can have two meanings: ‘to wrap oneself in something in order to keep warm’ or ‘to shield oneself against all accusations or responsibilities’. Playing simultaneously with both these meanings, Cotton will use the appeal of a warm and soft material and that of a traditional activity (both culturally familiar and reassuring: wool and knitting) in order to raise more profound and unsettling questions in a subtle and slightly subversive way.