One really can’t have a clear sense of the project without understanding the material processes involved.

First, using a four-harness floor loom, Cook manually fashions pre-dyed cotton and linen fibers into a plain weave, the same simple, overlapping pattern used to produce traditional artist’s canvases.

Almost like a drawing, a plain-woven canvas is constructed line by line, with each incremental cross-stitch at once a product and a literal illustration of the creative act.

With its array of levers, pedals, and reeds, the loom-based weaving process is highly repetitive, physically taxing, and above all, slow going; it takes a full week of concerted effort to produce just one of the 40-inch x 7-yard sheets of single-colored canvas he uses as his source material.

Once completed, those sheets are cut into shapes, combined and composed, and sewn together into a single unified canvas, which is then adhered to conventional stretcher bars and finally encased in a self-made wooden frame.

Ethan Cook’s sewn and woven works use repetition to explore how failure might be more of a symbiotic accompaniment to perfection. Using simple geometric shapes and a muted, limited color palate, his works are nourished by structural simplicity. The snags and inconsistencies allow these works to reach beyond the tropes of Modernism.

Born 1983 Texas

Upcoming Solo exhibition at Sunday-S Gallery in Copenhagen – April 28- 2017

Link to Q&A with Ethan Cook

Link to Artist Page >>> Ethan Cook

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