Words
	Lia Cook 2005 My current practice incorporates concepts of cloth, touch, and memory. I use the detail, an intimate moment in time, often woven in oversize scale to intensify a shared emotional and sensual experience. I use a digital loom to weave images that are embedded in the structure of cloth. The digital pixel becomes a thread that when interlaced with another becomes both cloth and image at the same time. This woven image brings with it many of the sensual experiences that we associate with cloth. Child hood family snapshot and video stills are some of the raw materials that I draw on to investigate small, intimate details of the body or to capture a fleeting human expression. My practice involves research into new technologies and new ways to translate my images that make the structure visible and physically felt, attempting to create the image as physical object. Quotes “The candid intimacy of the family snapshot seems an unlikely starting point for Lia Cook’s over-scale woven images, until one considers that such weaving, whatever its size, is the result of the organisation of small elements, close attention to detail and the dexterity of handwork. Just as informal family photos are a medium of transaction and an exchange of intimate information and shared history, cloth enfolds us into its history as we allow it to envelop us and record the marks and creases of our presence. The source of Cook’s images is a simple camera from the 1950s, which has a link to today’s imaging technology in the same way that computers have their origins in the manually operated Jacquard weaving looms of the early nineteenth century. In Big beach boy Cook links these technologies, exchanging pixels for thread and focusing closely on the bland subject matter of a tiny and apparently insignificant family photo of a baby. On closer inspection, when we seem to be skin-to-skin with the child in an uneasy embrace, the subject dissolves into a pointillist colour field of shimmering individual threads, allowing our senses to take us beyond the threshold of recognition.” — Robert Bell, Curator, National Gallery of Australia, Web text for exhibition "Transformations: The Language of Craft" 2005 “The viewer is struck by the sheer physicality of her art as well as by her intellectual engagement. Sensual and sumptuous these….. works… spur questions and concerns that bring down the curtain on conventional notions regarding painting and privilege.” —Miles Beller, review of “Material Allusions” traveling exhibition, in Artweek Magazine. “Absorption and inclusion are pervasive strategies in Cooks work, operating at almost every level: formally, in her constant exploration of new techniques; emotionally in the way she stimulates the sense of touch through the eyes; and intellectually in the multiple reference to different art histories. Her work reminds us that in English the phrase “to weave together “ means “to integrate.” — Meridith Tromble, essay for the Flintridge Foundation Awards forVisual Artists 1999/2000 catalogue.