Timothy Cook, Dancing with the Moon

Book excerpt: Timothy Cook has been lauded as a leading contemporary Australian artist: critically acclaimed, honored with the prestigious 2012 29th Telstra National Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, included in major exhibitions throughout Australia, and well represented in significant public and corporate collections. He has lived and worked for his entire life in a small settlement in the Tiwi Islands, in remote Indigenous Australia, deeply attached to his place. Cook is also a maverick artist: non-conformist, individualistic, original and inventive, straddling the modern and ancient with confidence. In this stunning monograph, author Seva Frangos attests to Timothy Cook's achievements, inhabiting a place and space where innovation might seem impossible against the background of tradition and ritual; where he realigns artistic and cultural boundaries and re-explores being Tiwi. These pages capture the remarkable levels of energy and emotional charge in his painting, and provide a brilliant introduction to Cook's vast body of work created over two decades in a range of media. [Subject: Art, Aboriginal Studies]