Michelle Cooke

Michelle Cooke’s body of work is comprised of poetic, Minimalist drawings, avant-garde fashion, and found object sculpture, along with her signature glass installations. Cooke has moved gracefully through incarnations of a unique installation process, which has led to an unusual viewing experience. Carefully inserting each 2" x 2" thin, delicate, square piece of transparent glass, Cooke creates a combination of illusion, tension, danger, poetry and beauty. “I find the recurring themes in my work to be those of fragility, transparency, balance, weightlessness, and gravity,” Cooke writes. “Each work yields its meaning through the handling of the material. I prefer fragile materials used in unconventional ways. In my work with glass I’ve focused on the inherent tension between its transparency as a light medium and its aggressiveness as a projecting grid.”

Michelle Cooke lives and works in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico and New York City, New York. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Claremont Graduate University and a BFA from the Art Institute of Southern California. Her glass installations have been included in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions in the United States and Europe, with dozens of solo and group shows in New Mexico.

http://www.harwoodmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/94