P O L L Y F I R S T
C O O K P O E M
INTRODUCTION “Love has inspired poets, musicians, and artists throughout history. It’s the emotion that connects us with the sublime.”
- Polly Cook
Southern artist POLLY COOK creates stunning mosaics of painted ceramic tile on wood panel inspired by themes of love and longing, hope and desire, celebrating our relationships with one another. Her work is narrative in nature, yet each piece suggests (rather than resolves) a story for the figures depicted. Cook draws and carves into large slabs of clay, often letting them break as they will; these random breaks in the images add to the psychological undertone of the work through their evocation of fragmentation and complexity.
Love has inspired poets, musicians, and artists throughout history. It’s the emotion that connects us with the sublime. Cook is also inspired by the theme of love, and it is at the heart of all her artwork, along with the accompanying emotions of longing, hope, desire and joy. It’s not just romantic love that interests Cook, but also for fellow human beings and animals, and the deep ties that include us in the wider circle of humanity.
Cook’s work is not to be taken as literal stories, but rather, they are emotional narratives, visual poetry. They are meant to be experienced as well as seen. Her love for the Romantic poets such as Byron and Keats, and the Pre-Raphaelite artists took Cook to England to study when she was 16. There, she was also introduced to the German Realists of the 1920s, and these different movements were an influence on Cook’s style. Though her first love is clay - starting with a pottery class at the age of 10 in Nashville, Tennessee - for the past several years she also have been enjoying painting with oils and acrylics on canvas.
We Got Away(Triptych) | Ceramic Tile on Wood | 83 x 136 Inches | $95,000
We Got Away(Diptych) | 2012 Ceramic Tile on Wood 91 x 91 Inches $70,000
City Words | 2018 Ceramic Tile on Wood 52 x 45 Inches $16,000
Forget Me Not, Forget Me Never | 2012 Ceramic Tile on Wood 46 x 47 Inches $12,000
I Intended a node | 2018 Ceramic Tile on Wood 41 x 51 Inches $10,000
Brooklyn Dream | 2018 Ceramic Tile on Wood 36 x 45 Inches $7,500
The Constant Lover 2 | 2018 Ceramic Tile on Wood 36 x 45 Inches $7,500
Confidence in Heaven | 2018 | Ceramic Tile on Wood | 29 x 44 Inches | $6,500
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