Lisa Coook
Face Maze Three Generations, 2006
Woven cotton
Courtesy of the artist

Lisa Cook weaves intimate portraits using a Jacquard loom that is hand-operated but augmented with digital controls. Face Mops Revisioned: Lips and the sixpanel Face Maze Three Generations show the dynamic interplay between eighteenth- and twenty-first-century technology. Cook deftly and deliberately manipulates the aesthetics of the loom using two binary systems—the warp and the weft of the threads, and the zeros and the ones of the digitized images. This process magnifies the topography of the face just enough for the portrait to be visible from afar, but the image becomes increasingly fragmented (and the weave more apparent) as one moves closer. We are left to wonder whether these are portraits, textiles, or something new altogether.