Andrew Kötting was born in Elmstead Woods in 1959. After some early forays into market trading and scrap-metal dealing he travelled to Scandinavia to become a Lumberjack. He returned home in the 80’s to study for a BA Honours Degree in Fine Art at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design and then graduated with a Masters Degree from The Slade, University College, London. He currently lives and works between Hastings in England and Fougax-et-Barrineuf in the forests of the French Pyrenees. He teaches part-time at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury where he is Professor of Time Based Media.
He has made numerous experimental short films, which were awarded prizes at several international film festivals. Gallivant (1996), was his first feature film, a road movie about his three-month journey around the coast of Britain, with his grandmother Gladys and his daughter Eden, which won the Channel 4 Prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival for Best Director and the Golden Ribbon Award in Rimini (Italy). The film went on in 2011 to be voted number 49 as Best British Film of all time by the UK publication Time Out.
In 2001 he directed the first of his Landworks Trilogy; This Filthy Earth, which was commissioned through Film4, British Screen and The Film Council and in 2009 he made the second part, Ivul, a French/Swiss co-production. Both films were released theatrically throughout the UK and France. Lek and the Dogs, the third and final part, is currently in development with the BFI.
In 2011 he produced This Our Still Life, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was acquired by the BFI for distribution in the UK and Ireland and by ED Distribution in France.
Since 1982, as well as performances, installations and publications, he has made over one hundred film and video works that have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television around the world and awarded prizes at many international film festivals.
In addition to his multimedia art project, performance, installation and bookwork; Swandown, he also created in collaboration with the writer Iain Sinclair a body of work entitled By Our Selves. The film premiered at FID in Marseille and was distributed to critical acclaim throughout the UK by Soda Pictures.
In the UK he has had retrospectives of his work at Tate Britain, ICA and the NFT and in Europe at Oberhausen, Osnabruck, Hamburg, La Rochelle, Rotterdam, Paris and Cork.
2016 saw a 6 week retrospective of his films at Cinema Nova in Brussels, the release of two short animated films in collaboration with his daughter Eden and a multi media arts project Edith made with Iain Sinclair, Jem Finer, Claudia Barton, David Aylward and Anonymous Bosch.