Helen Cook

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Gathering Pages Exhibition

 My summer residency in the Cambridge Artworks caravan was a huge success. I spent the first two weeks solidly making paper. From the 7 or 8 kg of nettles that I gathered, I made about 40 A6 sheets to pass out to folks who were interested in contributing to the book.

Artworks Caravan Residency: Nettle Paper

 I’m excited to announce that I’ll be spending two weeks in the Cambridge Artworks caravan for a summer residency from Aug 27 to Sept 9. I’ll be making nettle paper and inviting people to have a conversation with me about their relationship with paper.

Open Studios

 You are welcome to join me this July for Cambridge Open Studios. Two months away seems like a long time in advance to make plans, but a very short time to prepare everything that I’m excited to show you.

Friday's Colour

 I have been working on a collaboration with Elspeth Owen since December 2023. Each week, we search for and exchange photographs of colours that inspire or move us in some way. All 32 colours on a poster We wanted to share these photos more widely, so I designed prints of each of the photos which would show which week they were taken and by whom.

Developing a Night Painting

 I wanted to use the Watercolour Curious New Year’s Palette to paint a night scene to show off the dark colours that can be mixed with this palette. These darks are perfect for representing the contrast of warm insides and cool outsides.

Thinking in Palettes

 When I was learning to paint, I wanted to try out lots of different pigments to see how they worked on their own, and to see how they behaved when mixed with other colours. It’s hard to know exactly what colour a paint is going to be from looking at swatches, and especially from the colours printed in the manufaturer’s brochures or pdfs.

24 Colour Palette

 Crayons? Nope, just repurposing this old tin for a new watercolour studio palette. The tin is the perfect height to fit pans, and a bit of kneadable eraser makes up the difference in length and width.

Call for collaboration

 I’m looking for a web developer to collaborate with me on a client side browser based app that will take an uploaded image and then display the colours in the image as points in the 3D Munsell colour space. Why make this?

Transparency

 I have been thinking a lot about the idea of transparency recently. Things that are transparent are often made of thin and fragile material, and so they can be nearly invisible and overlooked. It’s rare to look directly at the pane of glass in a window.

Oyster Mushrooms

 We went out just before Christmas to a fallen oak log in a nearby patch of woods. The log has been naturally cultured with Pleurotus ostreatus, and it fruits prolifically after stresses like rain and cold. I was fascinated by the forms and patterns these mushrooms make.

New beginnings

 Welcome, new year! I feel like 2021 was a year of putting a lot of things into place, and 2022 is the year they can start to come alive. First, starting with this new site! As someone who last built websites 15 years ago, this whole process is much smoother today.


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