In Unfolding, Cotts creates layered compositions that balance geometric structure with intuitive mark-making. Rounded forms, vertical passages, and recurring motifs move across the picture plane, creating relationships using shapes with different levels of solidity and openness, that creates movement juxtaposing stillness. Built through successive layers of paint, scraping, drawing, and revision, the surfaces retain evidence of their making, allowing the paintings to unfold with it color, texture, and rhythm.

While the work is rooted in abstraction, many of the forms are informed by observations of the natural world and the body. References to breath, pulse, water, landscape, and shifting light are transformed into visual structures rather than direct representations. Areas of luminosity emerge alongside darker passages, creating a dynamic interplay of weight and balance, that create some spatial tensions. Throughout her paintings, light functions as a means of organizing perception of what the viewer's experience.

Cotts's paintings are layered, the surfaces full of evolving forms revealing a practice grounded in process, that is very intuitive and structured.