Nicky Coutts: man stupid

15 Sep-13 Oct 2018

Overview

An exhibition of drawings, writings and other multimedia artworks that takes as its starting point, Koko, the gorilla’s address to the Paris United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in 2015. Taught from infancy by US researcher Dr Penny Patterson Koko ‘understood’ over 2000 spoken English words and the equivalent in signs before her recent death in June 2018 aged 46. Her grasp of language was comparable to a 5-year old human child. At COP 21 she ‘spoke’ with her hands and arms, as ‘the voice of nature’. She said, ‘man stupid’, ‘nature see you’, ‘fix nature’. For this new body of work Coutts draws on five of the signed phrases Koko used during her address to look at what happens with ‘language’ when we attempt to form greater intimacies with neighbouring species.