Nordic Light – Beyond Horizons indicates Helle Cook’s burgeoning interest in the physical presence of light. A Danish-Australian artist, Cook draws inspiration from Nordic and South-East Queensland lights and settings. Through oil painting, textiles, ceramics, photography, performative action and participatory art, Cook seeks to retrieve new possibilities for being, seeing and belonging.
Her choices of oils and pigment inks, linen, cotton, silk or clay, tells of a preoccupation with the emotional and sensual qualities of the artistic materials. Explorations, (re)constructions and impressions on the country are grounded in experimentation and studio research. The integrative creative processes trace the artist’s personal history, lived memories of place and perceptual and imaginary interventions of light.
Anticipating the experience of the viewer, the first room presents Nordic Light (2024), a series of five large photographic prints on rag cotton paper that feature fabrics in motion over lush landscapes. Originally inspired by walks in nature, the silks are hand-dyed with non-toxic inks in the artist’s Brisbane studio. Later brought to her Denmark home, the paintings are taken along for new walks. Nordic Light documents the way in which the silks respond to surroundings, altering their shape and degrees of opacity or transparency. It captures Cook’s bodily engagement with the works and their temporally outdoor hanging. Poked by shards of light, the silk brings to the fore its transforming properties. Colours overlap into dazzling combinations of pink, red, green, turquoise and blue.
Vivid sky-blue hues permeate the exhibition, contrasting the subtle Scandinavian colour palette reclaimed in Cook’s oil paintings. Layering translucent ochres, they forge an interplay of absorptive and reflective lights. Continuously escaping one’s eye, abstract, repetitive folds of space and movement softly fuse into fictitious, candescent grounds. In their search for a discernible shape, the viewers eventually lose sight of it to become aware of the act of searching itself.
Unfinished by frames, six oversized, unstretched canvases hung on the gallery walls. Fastened at the upper side, their weight hangs down in creases, unravelling the flow of light and shape. The installation method is informed by Cook’s studio practice. It mediates the relationship between the surface of the work, expressive support and display conditions and enhances their visual attributes.
Read: Performance review: William Yang: Milestone, Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney Festival
The main gallery room showcases Fabric of Light (2025). A larger than life-size textile installation, it consists of nine eco-stained silks in tints and tones of the living earth. Re-dyed, upcycled and re-purposed, the silks are known to audience through the Nordic Light photographic series. Their revisitation in the flesh is a metaphorical act that parallels Cook’s return to her own home realms. In addition to spatial shifts, temporal ones reposition the viewer.
Suspended on circular supports from the ceiling, the sheets assume ovoid cylindrical forms. Gauzy and insubstantial, they gently drift into space. Through expansive windows, unfixed and changeable natural light bathes the works. Fabric of Light interrogates modes of visibility and tangibility, but also of immateriality and sensation.
Through manipulation of light, colour and a relational aesthetic, Cook creates an immersive environment that expands one’s sense of time and place. With Nordic Light – Beyond Horizons, meaning is produced in the transient area between dream and sensory awareness. Closing the exhibition, the participatory work Community Pockets (2020 – 2025), invites viewers to share and carry the meaning outside the gallery site.
Helle Cook: Nordic Light – Beyond Horizon is showing at Grey Street Gallery, Southbank, Brisbane, until 25 January 2025.
