Internationally known for her contribution to the modern fiber-art movement, artist Lia Cook incorporates concepts of cloth, touch, and memory into her large-scale weavings. She recently completed an artist residency in TREND (Transdisciplinary Research in Emotion, Neuroscience and Development) at the University of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine. During that time, she collaborated with scientists to explore and map how the human brain responds to viewing her woven works, which are based on photographs. Some of her current works use images of the neural connections in the white matter of her own brain, called fiber tracts, combined with snapshots of herself as a child. Cook will speak about her long-term interest in neuroscience and how experiments in perception and emotional inquiry have informed her current body of work.

A resident of Berkeley, California, Cook has been a Professor of Art at the California College of the Arts since 1976. She has exhibited widely across the United States, as well as in Australia, China, France and Ireland, among other countries. Her work can be found in many permanent collections, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Racine Art Museum; and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Lia Cook’s current exhibit of work, Bridge 11: Lia Cook, is on view at HCCC through May 13, 2012.