Mother

His ‘mother’ is always alone, her baby absent, although evidence of a child remains in the empty pram, abandoned toys on the Hopscotch court, & the slackness of the skipping rope. These images possess an arrested stillness that speak to 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. In their power they evoke the essential nature of the relationship between mother and child that is at the heart of human experience. Seductive yet enigmatic, Cook’s vignettes construct a psychological mirror between personal experience and political power.