Lia Cook
Folds, 2004
Jacquard tapestry
64 x 115 in.
Edition of 4

In much of my work I have explored concepts of touch, cloth and the body. By using tactile and structural characteristics of cloth as well as its inherent physicality, I try to create work that evokes a visceral response and arouses memories associated with cloth such as comfort and protection, safety, warmth and sensuality, as well as sometimes an underlying presence of fear, vulnerability, or loneliness.
… In an increasingly digitized world, weaving can be a material expression, a physical manifestation of a digital process. In these works image is embedded in the weaving, built through the structure of weaving. Threads are either up or down and in this case black or white. The evidence of this process can be seen, felt, experienced at close range while at a distance these individual particles, tracks, traces, coalesce into the larger images from which they were originally derived. These translated images are have not stayed the same, however, because now they take on a physical and tactile, even emotional presence. Through the weaving process and its material expression these personal images, largely stripped of specific context, take on new properties….become embodied, more alive, more intense.
(excerpted from Lia Cook’s website)