Lia Cook

Lia Cook Description

Lia Cook (b. 1942) is a fiber artist who combines weaving, painting, photography, and digital technology to create her work.

Cook’s work attempts to shatter restrictive theories about craft, art, science, and technology. Her focus is on the history and meaning of textiles in all cultures and their impact on our humanity. Her latest project is about the brain – Lia takes notions of imaging, memory, and emotion, measures the physical human response, and incorporates all this information into her weavings.

Her work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and is in the collection of the Philbrook Museum of Art, The Racine Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American Art, among others. Lia Cook (b. 1942) is a fiber artist who combines weaving, painting, photography, and digital technology to create her work. Cook’s work attempts to shatter restrictive theories about craft, art, science, and technology. Her focus is on the history and meaning of textiles in all cultures and their impact on our humanity. Her latest project is about the brain – Lia takes notions of imaging, memory, and emotion, measures the physical human response, and incorporates all this information into her weavings. Her work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and is in the collection of the Philbrook Museum of Art, The Racine Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American Art, among others. Lia Cook (b. 1942) is a fiber artist who combines weaving, painting, photography, and digital technology to create her work. Cook’s work attempts to shatter restrictive theories about craft, art, science, and technology. Her focus is on the history and meaning of textiles in all cultures and their impact on our humanity. Her latest project is about the brain – Lia takes notions of imaging, memory, and emotion, measures the physical human response, and incorporates all this information into her weavings. Her work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and is in the collection of the Philbrook Museum of Art, The Racine Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American Art, among others.

Lia Cook Statement

My practice explores the sensuality of the woven image and the embodied emotional connection to memories of touch and cloth. Drawing from the history of painting and textiles, I use the detail to expose a moment of touch, the physical presence of cloth, often woven in oversize scale to intensify sensual and emotional associations. Cloth and our bodies are so interconnected that we often experience a visceral response to the visual. Although in the piece "Drapery Frieze After Leonardo" and related works the human body is often hidden from view, the shape or the form of the draped cloth suggests a human presence beneath the folds, sometimes only a glimpse of a hand or foot defines the moment of touch.

In my current work, I use a digital loom to weave images (of faces) 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. I am particularly interested in the threshold at which the face image dissolves first into pattern and finally into a sensual tactile woven structure. What does this discovery and the resulting intense desire to touch the work add to our already innate, almost automatic emotional response to seeing a face?

My most recent work explores the nature of this emotional response to woven faces in collaboration with neuroscientists and uses the laboratory experience both with process and tools to stimulate new work in response to these investigations.
 

Lia Cook Resumé