Cook, a fiber artist and educator from California, will be giving a lecture on her work Thursday at The Textile Museum in Northwest Washington. Her piece “Coptic Manga” is on exhibit at the museum. Cook explores expression and reaction within her textiles of human faces. To register for the lecture, go to textilemuseum.org. What is the focus of your lecture?
I’ve been working on collaborative work with neuroscientists, and I am looking into what it is about the woven translation of the face that adds an emotion or different quality to [my work]. I’ve also been working with brain imagery. They’re called fiber tracts. I looked at Coptic faces from around 400 A.D. One is from Syria. I took these little 1-by-1-inch-sized faces, and I’ve woven a whole piece that has a lot of different expressions.
What is your method for creating textiles?
Right now I’m working with this very high-tech loom from Norway. I have a lot of ability to change things with more immediacy working with it. I’m drawing on family photographs. Then I create my own way of translation and my own structure in the way the threads go up and down. Then that’s put into a different program that runs the loom. It does feed the information in, so when I press a pedal to weave, the right threads come across. Then I weave by hand. I’m making the image tactile and physical.
How did you begin working with textiles?
My interest in textiles began when I took a tour in Mexico, and I saw a lot of indigenous weaving and textile making. Then I studied textiles in Sweden, and I learned a lot of techniques and processes.
– Roxanne Turnbull
