Helle Cook – Notion of Home

Posted on March 2, 2017 in Art News, Art Show, Australian Art, Contemporary Art, Culture

What defines the notion of home?

This is what Danish-born, Brisbane-based artist Helle Cook investigates in her painting practice. A recent graduate of Queensland College of Art (QCA), Cook’s works linger on the verge between abstraction and figuration, both recognisable and ethereal.

Painting in oil, she lets the medium’s slow process work to her advantage, using the time to contemplate her sense of place in the world – the plurality of life lived between various homelands, and the sense of belonging in between. Drawing on interior and exterior monologues, Cook’s paintings explore home, identity, connection, culture and memories. Intuitive and imaginative, her work is an experimentation into the cognitive neuroscience of creativity, engaging both sensory and episodic memory to allow the paint to take agency.