"As with the Japanese woodcuts and Mughal miniatures that she admires, Cooper’s work shows no fear of colour and allows us to travel across time, place and meaning. Conversely, the complexity of that meaning is not clouded by form and composition. Cooper prefers to work with a ‘minimal stage set’ where the simplified outlines do the work. There is something of the primeval, the essential, in this reduction, something that takes us to the primitive drawings of the cavemen and women.....It is not hard to find the references to Picasso, Chagall, Modersohn Becker, Kollwitz and Clemente in Cooper’s work but essentially it is very distinctively, and very consistently, Cooper. ….Cooper’s creativity is inspired by the women in her work, their physicality, their fluidity and balance, and they are often seen in positive, collaborative partnership, with nature, with another figure, or simply with a shadow." Kathleen Soriano.
Selected Collections:
Arts Council Collection, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery,
British Council, British Museum, Imperial College, London, Kunsthalle, Nuremberg, Germany, Manchester Art Galleries, MIMA, Middlesborough, New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, Newport Art Gallery, Open University, Milton Keynes, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Swindon Art Gallery, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, University of Warwick Art Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Walpole Library, Yale University, USA, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Wolverhampton Art Gallery.