It’s often takes a second look for viewers to realize artist Patti Cook created of her artwork with something other than paint.
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It’s often takes a second look for viewers to realize artist Patti Cook created of her artwork with something other than paint.
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The Sarnia artist has an exhibition, alongside the Fibre Artist Collective, running through April 27 at Gallery in the Grove, upstairs at the Bright’s Grove Library in Sarnia.
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“It is a little bit different than what you would typically see in an art exhibition,” Cook said of her pieces in the show.
“I am a mixed-media artist and I have been a painter for many years,” she said. “However textiles have always been a big part of my life.”
Cook said she began working about 15 years ago with a technique using raw wool.
“I realized there’s really nothing you can’t do with wool,” Cook said. “You can sculpt with it, you can create clothing, you can create paintings,” as well as wool pottery. “I call it wool alchemy.”
Cook said she decided to use wool in place of paint.
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“I literally paint pictures with wool,” she said.
For this exhibition, she decided to focus on “the old masters’ style of still life,” Cook said.
“When people first look at the picture, I want them to think it’s painted. And then they walk up and they go ‘oh my gosh, that’s not paint. What is it?’”
That’s often when they realize the image was created with wool, but not always, Cook said.
“Sometimes I have to explain that it’s wool,” she said.
The exhibition includes 11 of her wool “paintings.”
They include one titled “Big Mac,” featuring a McIntosh apple.
Also, Cook said, “everyone who knows me knows I love flowers and paint flowers a lot.”
So, the exhibition includes a piece featuring hydrangeas going through the stages of the flower’s life.
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“The really nice thing about hydrangeas is they look just as beautiful when they’re dry,” Cook said.
There are pieces featuring roses at the end of their bloom as well as a “fantasy peony” in “extremely bold and vibrant colours that you would not see in a peony,” she said.
Cook worked for years in engineering design at Nova Chemicals but is now retired.
“I have a studio space I’m just so grateful for,” she said. “That’s where I get to go play.”
Bright’s Grove, where Cook was raised, is her “home turf” although she hasn’t lived in the lakefront neighbourhood for about a dozen years, she said. “That’s where my heart is.”
Cook’s exhibition is in the gallery’s west room and the Fibre Artist Collective, which includes work by Simone Vojvodin, Cheryl Laakes, Karen Rutledge and Cydna Kay, is exhibiting in the east room.
The gallery, which is run by volunteers, is open Monday to Thursday, 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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