Marion Coutts

Marion Coutts (born 1965) is a British sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, author, and musician, known for her work as an installation artist and her decade-long tenure as frontwoman for the post-punk band Dog Faced Hermans. In 2014, she published her critically acclaimed memoir, The Iceberg.

Early life Marion Coutts was born in Nigeria and raised in the United Kingdom. Her parents were Salvation Army ministers with whom she traveled extensively. and at age 10, Coutts started playing trumpet for a large Salvation Army band.

Coutts' family lived in London and then Scotland where she stayed to attend college, earning her BA degree in Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art from 1982 to 1986.

Music

While attending college, Coutts joined an improvisational musical project called Volunteer Slavery. Named after an album by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the group consisted of three men and three women who "mostly banged on things,"

Dog Faced Hermans

In 1986, three members of Volunteer Slavery wanted to continue on as a more serious band, and Coutts expressed interest in being their vocalist. They named themselves Dog Faced Hermans, after an obscure reference in a Frankenstein film, and began paring down their music into shorter, faster songs that still maintained some of Volunteer Slavery's experimental elements. Instant Composers Pool, with British groups Spaceheads and the Honkies; with American group God Is My Co-Pilot on their 1994 Peel Session, and with cellist Tom Cora. After a musical hiatus, she recorded on a couple of compilation tracks, but no musical output has been heard from her since 1998. 2000's Assembly superimposed film of flocking starlings onto a wooden lectern.

2002's Cult beckoned onlookers to squeeze between a configuration of rectangular columns and peer into the eyes of a black cat looped in semi-stillness on nine video monitors. Artforum stated, "Cult evokes prehistoric standing stone circles as well as hieratic Egyptian cat sculpture-in ancient Egypt, the cat goddess Bastet was the patroness of family happiness." First installed at London's Chisenhale Gallery, the gallery describes the work:

The viewer first experiences the group from a distance, the monitor screens providing the only source of light. Moving onto the platform and amongst the screens, visitors are made aware that each cat is moving, but barely perceptibly. From any position, only two or three of the cats' faces are visible. Each cat goes through a cycle of opening and closing their eyes, of waking and sleeping and each cycle remains dogmatically out of sync with its neighbours. 2002's No Evil Star, named for the second half of a well-known palindrome , shows closeups of live mealworms colonizing a clay city. Moor also scored Twenty Six Things, a film that Coutts comprised from artifacts collected by Henry Wellcome that she herself was never permitted to touch. In 2001, she undertook a MOMART Fellowship at Tate Liverpool, followed by a Kettle's Yard Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge in 2003.

In 1997, Coutts began a relationship with fellow artist Tom Lubbock who wrote for the arts section for the British newspaper The Independent. The two married in 2001 and lived in separate flats in the north and south of London.

In 2001, Coutts began tutoring and guest teaching at Goldsmiths University, taking up a permanent position there in 2007. Concurrently, she was a visiting tutor for the Sculpture, City and Guilds of London Art School in 2002 and 2003, a visiting lecturer and then research fellow at the Norwich School of Art and Design on and off from 2004 to 2009, and an associate lecturer at University of the Arts, London from 2005 to 2010. In 2009, after Lubbock's first brain surgery and rounds of chemotherapy, Coutts began to jot things down in a series of Word docs. Initially these fragments, or "little lenses" as Coutts calls them, were a reflexive practice, which she eventually joined into a chains of texts and realized as a larger work.

In 2014, Coutts published her book The Iceberg, a "poetic and searing memoir" about her husband's death. The memoir begins at the point of Lubbock's 2008 diagnosis and follows him, Coutts, and their son Eugene (called "Ev" in the book) up through his treatment and eventual death in 2011. The Iceberg was shortlisted for several literary prizes, and Coutts was awarded the Wellcome Book Prize in 2015.

Works Discography Albums with Dog Faced Hermans:

Humans Fly (1988, Calculus) Everyday Timebomb (1989, Vinyl Drip) Mental Blocks For All Ages (1991, Konkurrel/Project A Bomb) Hum of Life (1993, Konkurrel/Project A Bomb) Bump and Swing (1994, Konkurrel/Alternative Tentacles) Those Deep Buds (1994, Konkurrel/Alternative Tentacles)

Sculpture and installation Fresh Air (1998) Souvenir (2000) Decalogue (2001) For The Fallen (2001) Prophet (2001) Sibyl (2001) Cult (2002) Everglade (video, 2003) Money (2003) Tenner (2003) abcdefg (2007) Reading Column (2008) Twenty-Six Things (16mm film, 2008)

Film and video Epic (2000) Mountain (2005) Cult at Chisenhale Gallery in London (2002) To Be Continued... at Kunsthalle Helsinki (2005) Tablet in London (2005) Responding to Rome at The Estorick Collection, The New Art Centre and Chisenhale Gallery.

Awards 2015 Wellcome Book Prize