Octavia Cook's career has had two main phases. From the early 2000s, in Auckland, she worked under the name of a fictional company, Cook & Co, and was known particularly for brooches in the style of Victorian cameos, often bearing her own profile, sometimes in the guise of historical figures, or those of family members and friends. The pieces were beautifully fashioned, typically in metals (sometimes precious ones) and acrylic, while yielding ideas about value and status that resonate well beyond traditional expectations of jewellery invoked by the Cook & Co brand. In 2012, Cook moved to Dunedin, and around the same time initiated the demise of her ‘company’. Recent work has taken the form of large-scale but still wearable brooches, carrying the camouflage patterns of assorted creatures. These works allude to another Victorian tradition, that of acrostic jewellery, in which a sequence of gemstones would be decoded, by way of their first letters, to spell out a hidden sentiment. Earlier this year, Cook held what she calls a ‘family reunion with jewellery’ at Objectspace, Auckland, titled Cook & Company. It was a survey of her work plucked from public and private collections, complemented by jewellery pieces from her own collection by a range of other artists and a series of commissioned objects for displaying and storing jewellery.
Edward Hanfling: It seems significant that Cook & Company really is company, in the sense of a group of people, whereas Cook & Co was just you. Octavia Cook: Yes, a company of one! Because I'm not usually a particularly collaborative worker, I thought it would be nice to invite other people whom I wouldn't normally work with. I knew Anna Wallis well, having worked with her at Workshop 6 in Kingsland for about 16 years. I knew Nicholas Stevens and Deborah Smith through Anna Miles, while Gerard Dombroski, Turumeke Harrington and Isobel Thom— well, I knew of Isobel's work through Anna Miles, but they were complete strangers to me before I embarked on this. I kind of put tentacles out . . .
E.H.: Octopus
