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Rosie H. Cook

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Conservation and Climate Change

The Sound of Shadows

Making Connections

2017 Asialink Arts Residency

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  Crazed Puppets

Crazed Puppets 04

 This is not a Kowangan

bundengan-01

#APTCCARN5

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I love my Icebreaker merino wool hoodies — I have two, one in black and one in teal (I stopped acquiring teal garments a couple years ago but I make my clothes last so I’m stuck with a lot of reminders that #rosielovesteal). They both have the same problem however, they fray at the inside cuff, which makes them look shabby even though they are otherwise in great condition at 8 and 6 years old respectively. Today I picked out a precise match of Aubusson wool from my now extensive collection, and tried my hand at darning the cuffs — the first one came out slightly uneven but the second attempt is good enough to show. None of the colours are the same in the different photos as it took several different sessions over the course of the day… #visiblemending #darning
Brought my baby to work and he immediately tried to touch all the paintings 🤭 featuring the work of Anna Lugovska at Gallery Brulhart
A quick visit to the MEG this morning to appreciate their conservation studios and indulge in a little photo shoot of the beautiful range of materials used in caring for their broad collection of objects from around the world. There’s something about the mix of colours and textures that makes it impossible for me to resist 😍 #conservatorsofinstagram #textileconservation Merci Lucie de ton accueil! 😘 #megageneve
I received this lovely bouquet from my friend Karen to celebrate my birthday (which was back in July but I decided to have my birthday lunch today 🤷‍♀️). I’ve captured it for Instagram in an entirely artificial context — the cleaner came this morning and my toddler is in daycare, now to move both flowers and vase out of reach before the chaos redescends upon our home #rosieloveslesfleurs
I just started at contemporary art space Gallery Brulhart in Geneva. Yesterday evening we had an exhibition of Ukrainian artists; all women who, along with curator @lugovska_anna, have had their lives and artistic practice thrown into turmoil by the war. I will share the artworks and moments from this exhibition launch on the gallery Instagram account, @mbruelhart, but here I wanted to share this snapshot of a personally memorable moment. I am watching artist Dasha S. Kandinsky carry out an emergency intervention on one of her paintings which had smudged during the packing process — fascinating for me as a conservator with all of our ethics and research around treating artworks. But also I am a little flushed with embarrassment at the realisation I accidentally dressed in the Ukrainian flag colours 🇺🇦. Anyway — I’m very happy to be working with Mona at Gallery Brulhart and I can’t wait to share more of our projects with you over the coming months! #conservator #gallerybrulhart
These two books have had a strong effect on my sense of identity over the past couple of months. “The Baby on the Fire Escape” has given me a new lens (that of what the author calls the “mind-baby problem) to understand and appreciate the lives and works of women whose brilliance marked the 20th century, the first time in history when, due in part to access to contraception, mothers could also be artists, writers, creatives. The ideas of “leaning in”, of “supermums”, of “having it all” — they do not belong in these narratives. Understanding the inner turmoil of feminist creative heroes such as Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, Alice Walker and Alice Neel, amongst others, has helped me situate myself as I try to establish what motherhood looks like for me, whilst still maintaining the work that inspires me. #rosieshelfie #thebabyonthefireescape
Hooked on containers and thread organisation… my DMC embroidery threads 😍 #threadrainbow #rosielovesrainbows #dmcthreads
Doing some thread organisation today — taking a break from sorting my Aubusson yarns and enjoying the quick and easy sorting of 2/20 @pipers_silks into my unrelated categories of colds, muted and reds. #rosielovesrainbows #silkthread
Tonala, my Mexican cat, supervising the huge amount of Aubusson wool I brought back from my visit to la Creuse. I picked up an entire rubbish bag full of Aubusson wool from the “Fête à la brocante” in the village of Ars, where I went to primary school. It was only 10€, and now I regret not buying everything there, although I have nowhere to store it and even less use for it right now. A girl can dream though! And Tonala also came home with me from the Creuse this week — he was purchased from Mexico by my grandfather many decades ago, and lived in the bathroom at my grandparents’ house. I don’t know anything about Mexican ceramics but I did some research and learned that this style of burnished pottery is known as Tonala, named for the Valley of Tonalà as well as the ceramic traditions of the pre-Hispanic Tonalteca people. An unusual juxtaposition of cultures, currently dominating my studio as I try to get caught up on my writing!
I picked up this small paperback at a Noz discount superstore, priced at 5€ instead of 18€. Its cover is misleading as it looks like one of those Taschen-style collections of colour plates, but when I had flipped through it I was surprised to see it had at least a 50-50 ratio of writing to photos, so I took it home with me. I just finished reading it and it was such a great collection of essays taking down the orientalist and objectifying colonial postcard trend. Every postcard reproduced in here is framed by the essay topics, which gives a real depth to each photograph as you interpret and identify clues to the stories of the women whose images were commodified and sent “home” from the french colonies in Algeria, Tunisia or Morocco. With the exception of the last essay (by a white male politician 🤷‍♀️ who owns most of the postcards and couldn’t resist talking about the “seins nus” that “éveillent une admiration sans mélange… perfection de beaucoup de modèles” 🤮— “bare breasts that awake an admiration of the perfection of many of the models”) the authors are women and the text feels like a re-appropriation. I’m not very articulate (what else is new) but I really appreciated this small book and I’m hoping to find another two in the same collection, about Egyptian women, and about North African Jewish women. “Femmes d’Afrique du Nord - Cartes postales (1885-1930)” third edition 2010 by Leïla Sebbar, Christelle Taraud and Jean-Michel Belorgey, Éditions Bleu Autour #rosieshelfie
Whilst I’m documenting my little collection of projects… here are three lovely textiles James brought back for me from Thailand last month. It took a lot of effort for him to hunt down small scrappy pieces, textiles which have been dismantled in order to be repurposed. Tourists are expected to buy beautiful new textiles, or beautiful antique textiles, so I appreciate the effort he went to on my behalf… The bottom two seem to be from baby carriers (not likely to be the same one though). Again, looking forward to working on these small scale pieces for a portfolio, probably with very minimal intervention, focusing more on safe mounting for wall display. #textileconservation #thaitextiles
Today I received these four conveniently small textiles (each around 45cm x 45cm) in the mail from my mother. They are from my father’s house and feature more or less vividly in my memories from 30-odd years ago. They don’t have any particular value or provenance that I am aware of — he would pick things up in brocantes that caught his eye and fit with his general hippy decor. Their appeal to me now is primarily their size and condition — it’s very handy to have a couple of miniature rugs in my portfolio to demonstrate mounting and hanging techniques, as well as the opportunity to give them some TLC for before/after shots. The woven bag has a rather garish pompom added by a previous owner, which I might replace with something better matched. I’m undecided about the level of intervention I want to pursue, but as these are mine to do with as I wish, I may try and push myself with a bit of restoration! #textileconservation
The first step with this Persian kilim has been untangling the warps and wefts, and temporarily sewing up the damaged edges so they don’t unravel further. It’s been a great exercise in patience and blanket stitch! I have done a tiny bit of reweaving/tightening up loose patches just to neaten things up, but there’s a lot of damaged warps that will need replacing (nearly all of them, to be honest) before I actually attempt proper reweaving. This rug belongs to my Iranian friend Afarin; we were sitting on it in the garden at her toddler’s birthday party when I made the unexpected request to borrow it so I can mess around with wool and warps for the summer… it’s quite a nice change for me to think of it as a living object that will return to partying eventually. #textileconservation #kilim #rugconservation #kilimrepair
One for the museum worker memes 🥲🫠😝
It’s a bit chaotic but it’s chock full of projects on the go, and above all it’s my own space, where I can believe in myself as some kind of professional. Professional what? I’m not sure… but it involves textiles whether it’s academic writing, artistic collaboration, conservation, digital humanities, grant applications, or my own embroidery practice. Everything is kind of nebulous and unclear, but it’s also good to let go of the compulsion to classify and categorise, the pursuit of perfectionism, and the need to define everything. Consequently I cannot think of suitable hashtags, a downside perhaps 😝
@karl_and_karl says he is NOT giving up his new-found spot on the rug I’m planning to re-weave (actually he’s just yawning but he looks ferocious and he’s refusing to move).
Shelfie time! No trip to a museum is complete without a visit to the bookshop, and the Quai Branly bookshop had a few treasures in stock for me. The catalogue for the Route des chefferies exhibition was a must-have, and it has so much essential reading as well as fascinating deep dives into the chefferie culture of West Cameroon. I also went from knowing nothing about the Cameroonian Ndop textile practice, to being utterly enamoured with it, so this book which covers everything from the raw materials, making, design symbolism and usage, was hard to resist. And then this sweet book about children’s costumes in the Asian textiles at the Musée Guimet was a bargain for only 12 euros — and an opportunity to also learn more about the Bengali collector Krishna Riboud whose legacy the collection is founded on. Children’s clothes, similar to puppet costumes, are such an underrated but charming category of textiles 😍 #rosieshelfie
My order of “one of everything” 2/20 silk thread has arrived from @pipers_silks 😍😍😍 I’ve missed having thread rainbows in my life! Now to identify a suitable storage method and organise them by colour #rosielovesrainbows #threadrainbow
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