Winning
Kristen Coates
Mixed media installation | 2025
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"I've never been drawn to competition. It has always felt like something happening in another room, not quite for me."
Winning is a sculptural arrangement of vintage trophies collected, selected, and composed by Kristen Coates as both a celebration and a quiet subversion of traditional achievement. Removed from their original context and reimagined as a bouquet, these objects lose their specificity but gain something softer, stranger, and more reflective.
Coates approaches the piece not as a commentary on victory, but as an exploration of beauty, ritual, and the emotional weight we place on proof of achievement. The trophies, some gleaming, others tarnished, are arranged with the eye of a floral designer or perhaps more accurately, the hand of a painter. There is intention in what was polished and what was left untouched. In what stands tall and what leans, unsure.
“I’m less interested in what someone won than in why they felt the need to try,” she says. “This work isn’t about the original meaning of a specific trophy. It’s about the gaze of the viewer and where the response sits emotionally.”
Both playful and poignant, Winning invites us to reconsider what we value, and what we choose to honor. Not every accolade needs a nameplate. Not every success comes with applause. Sometimes, the arrangement itself is enough.
