Insight...

Linda Cook  November 2022

On The Edge

For Wave Project Space

In Cook’s new work ‘On the Edge’, what strikes me most is the interplay between the base colours and the foregrounds. The foregrounds might be seen to lie between the rustic and the abject, but they occupy their own space: they’re not as nostalgic as rusticism, or deliberately unsavoury as art of the abject. 

Instead, they capture the inelegance of the artistic process, they contain workshop detritus, packaging, off-cuts. Some have hair, powder clay, and other found objects. They’re workaday. They take pleasure in materiality and in the rough and ready delights of painting as an occupation. 

The foregrounds would be reason enough to read them as an invitation to enjoy the artist’s creative process.  But what’s underneath is just as important, I think. 

Underlying the pieces, or around their borders, the hues are brighter, at others they’re near-fluorescent, and occasionally an incandescence bursts right out of the work.  As I see it, the muted tones of the outer layers of the work are barely containing the sheer joy of creation beneath them. 

That this joy often takes a backseat to more muted foregrounds reflects a reality we all know.  For most of us, the light - the pleasure of creation - is often clouded by other concerns in our creative processes. Exposure, funding, our relevance to the social dialogue, politics, life, death, taxes, and other facticities. But that joy is always at the fringes, underlying our creations, and just often enough the light breaks through completely. 

Intentionally or not, the titles of works capture this half-hidden joy. It’s there in the buzz of “A Cloud of Bees From a Secret Hive” or in the hidden light of “Incandescent Molecules” and “My Window Receives Inevitable Darkness”. And it’s there in the interplay between the exposed and the buried of “Floating Under the Surface” and “Saltwater Leaks Through the Crevices”. 

For Wadsworth Longfellow the sun is always shining behind the clouds, for Leonard Cohen there are cracks in everything that let the light in, and for Cook there is always light beyond the borders, joy underlying the creative process. It’s always there on the edge. 

M Harris