Michael Cook

Michael Cook employs the camera as the supreme intermediary device – the ‘third eye’ which can bridge European and Indigenous worlds and perspectives. The photograph is, for Cook, that imaginary place of possibility where we can be invited to experience the other side of the coin, roles in reversal, worlds inverted, histories re-written. What would it be like to take your part? To walk in your shoes? To see through your eyes? There is a playful innocence and palpable joy in Cook’s speculations and specularisations (ego projections) evocative of dressing up, make-believe, and telling tales. Images are elaborately crafted with sumptuous detail and a seductive power to transport.

Cook’s fantastic works, where past, present and future collide, are home to both vast chasms of disparity and intense points of connection. The images promise imaginative pathways through minefields of associations, as we sense potential unravellings of historical consequence.

Enticed into fictional scenarios, viewers are free to make their own inquiries, explore feelings, and test their relationship to aspects of Australia’s colonial history. While always knowing he is Aboriginal but perhaps never feeling Aboriginal, Cook has made artworks that are complex and entangled, often provocative and sometimes preposterous, but always driven by empathy and openness.

Michael Cook was adopted at birth into a non-Indigenous family. While cut off from the connection to his biological and social Aboriginal heritage, he was fortunate enough to have an adoptive mother who embraced his Aboriginality and empowered him to imagine what that might mean for him and for the world he lived in. Michael’s adoptive mother was a passionate social worker and activist, involved in fighting for Aboriginal rights and environmental causes, including the Fraser Island Defence Organisation. Her passion for social justice and her deep empathy for Aboriginal people inform the foundation of Michael Cook’s practice.

In 2022, Michael Cook won the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and the Josephine Ulrick Photography People’s Choice Award, and was also a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize. Cook has exhibited extensively, nationally and internationally. His artworks are held in all major Australian collections, and in significant international collections, including the British Museum, London, The Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, USA.

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