Lia Cook (American, born 1942)
Facing Touch
INV-2345
Lia Cook (American, born 1942)2011
Facing Touch
Lia Cook (American, born 1942) →21st Centurytextilefiber art
Date
2011
Medium
Cotton and rayon, weaving on digital hand loom
Dimensions
137.2 × 130.2 cm (54 × 51 1/4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Purchased with funds provided by the Textile Society
Lia Cook has long been interested in how the human brain reacts to the desire for touch. In the early 2000s, she began to work with neuroscientists to compare the brain’s response to viewing a woven image of a face versus a photograph of the same face. They discovered that seeing the woven image triggered greater activity in the part of the brain most affected by touch. Facing Touch illustrates this experiment: in it, a girl wearing a cap with sensors attached reaches out to a woven portrait also by Cook, Binary Traces: Young Girl, from 2004.
Also notable
Works in the same vein
