Tom Cookson was born in Huddersfield in 1987. He is currently on the BA Fine Art course at Leeds College of Art & Design.
He recently showed in Klanging Banging, Neville Street, Leeds, 2008; Industrial Sabotage, Armley Mills, Leeds, 2008; Northern Art Show, Harrogate, 2008; Strangely Familiar, PSL, Leeds, 2008. He is to be included in Expo09, Leeds, 2009.
Cookson’s current interests lie predominantly with the manipulation of ‘found sounds’ and footage from his large archive of home videos to create unworldly and dreamlike situations. He is interested in the relationship between ancient, mystic technologies and their modern equivalents in an attempt to upgrade the ancient. Native Americans believed the night air was filled with dreams both good and bad, they would hang dream catchers in their homes that catch the dreams as they float by. In a similar way, information in the form of radio waves and digital signals really do fill the air and are received by satellite dishes.
In Cookson’s Dream Dish Model: TC08 a TV is hooked up to a modified satellite dish and plays the ‘filtered airwaves’ showing only Native American culture and prophecies. The irony of this is that Native Americans were victims of the most successful extermination in history. Instead of filtering dreams, the dream dish filters out their terrible past and receives what is beautiful about their culture.
