13 Michael Cook – Winner

Sunshine Coast Art Prize 2016 – Winner

[Image courtesy of the artist]

Michael Cook | Mother – Tennis | 2016 | digital photograph inkjet on photo rag | 80 x 120 cm

Artist Statement

Mother is a journey through 13 images of a woman in a deserted Australian landscape. The mother is always alone, her baby absent, although evidence remains of there having been a child: the empty pram, the abandoned toys on the hopscotch court, the slackness of the skipping rope. These images possess an arrested stillness that implies a recently bereft status.

Michael Cook has tackled subjects from the political to the historical since he turned to creating art imagery in 2009. In Mother, we see his most intensely personal work to date. While these images speak directly and poetically to Australia’s Stolen Generation, they speak also to a universal experience of disconnection between mother and child.