NEW LONDON, CONN.- The Lyman Allyn Art Museum announces an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Australian born contemporary artist Judy Cotton. In an environment impacted by global warming, Cotton creates artwork with a focus on water, glaciers, melting ice, and insect life, offering a meditation on the natural world and the forces that threaten its balance. Hidden Water: Paintings and Sculpture by Judy Cotton will be on view from July 14 through November 11, 2018.

Judy Cotton was born in Australia in 1941 and has lived and worked in the United States since 1971. In 2008 she began living full time in Lyme, Connecticut beside the Connecticut River. The constant presence of this body of water—fast moving through most of the year, frozen solid in winter—has influenced and informed her work in different contexts and media. In Cotton’s words, “I live beside water and am reminded daily by its constantly moving and mysterious presence that we must care for this precious element before it is irretrievably exhausted.”

Hidden Water: Paintings and Sculpture by Judy Cotton is a multi-media exhibition presenting art that speaks to the artist’s ecological concerns. Art critic Sebastian Smee has described Cotton as “a passionate observer of the natural world, both in the wilds of America and in her native Australia... Cotton has long been drawn to the lives and movement of animals, plants, fires, floods, rivers, and skies—to life in flux.” Over 30 of Cotton’s paintings and scores of small sculptures will be displayed in the Lyman Allyn’s second floor galleries, with one room imagined as a cabinet of curiosities containing sculpted nests, insects and other natural and artificial “specimens.” Through the creation of resin casts of an array of animals she has found in nature, Cotton addresses ecological degradation and species loss as well as an understanding of life, sociality, and resilience of all forms.

Several water-focused installations will occupy the museum’s outdoor grounds, engaging viewers in a dialogue about water use, pollution, rising ocean levels, and other environmental concerns. While touring the grounds, visitors will observe a dry river bed made from embedded stone, an ark made from driftwood collected from the Connecticut River, a bamboo channel feeding a working waterwheel, and a wasps nest large enough for visitors to walk into. Several other sculptures are installed elsewhere on the grounds, and visitors are encouraged to pick up a sculpture trail map at the Museum’s front desk to guide their exploration. In addition, an audio tour of the outdoor installations voiced by Judy Cotton and Sam Quigley, Director of the Lyman Allyn, will be available on Lyman Allyn’s app. Visitors can download the free app in the Apple App Store while visiting the Museum to experience a new way of encountering art.

Judy Cotton is an internationally recognized artist who has had 35 solo shows and participated in over 70 group exhibits. She has shown work in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and China. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia, The New Britain Museum of American Art, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the Florence Griswold Museum, The Bathurst Regional Gallery and numerous private collections. A ten year survey of her work traveled in New South Wales in Australia in 2002-2003.

This exhibition is curated by the renowned scholar and curator Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims. A monograph on Cotton’s life and work, titled Judy Cotton Essential Elements, written by Australian arts critic and commentator Diana Simmonds will be presented for the first time at the exhibition.