Lia Cook

Practicing as an artist in the "feminine" medium of weaving was an act of radical politics when Lia Cook began her career in the 1970's. For more than thirty years, she challenged the separate and unequal status of weaving in relationship to painting through various and inventive Op Art weavings, sculptural weavings, installation weavings, even 'old master' weavings based on the drapery in Renaissance paintings. Cook's most recent weavings, which are the subject of this book, exhibit the sensuality and ambiguity, the brilliant sense of color, the large scale and magnification of detail, the love of texture, and the fusion of artistic disciplines, that has long characterized her work.