COOK 2021.674
By Australian Art team
March 2026
Nature Morte (Blackbird) 2021 draws on visual strategies affiliated with the still life genre – particularly the memento mori, a visual reminder of the inevitability of death – to highlight the devastating impact of colonisation from an Indigenous point of view.
Translating from French as ‘dead nature’ (or ‘still life’), Cook’s ‘Natures Mortes’ series echo the tone of paintings made in the seventeenth-century European tradition. Rather than presenting the opulence of excess, the artist redeploys this aesthetic to highlight the dark and troubled past behind such seemingly lavish compositions.
The black cockatoos symbolise the inhuman practices of the Australian sugar industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work’s title refers to ‘blackbirding’ – the capture and transportation of South Sea Islander people to Australia, where they would serve as indentured labourers in the burgeoning banana and sugar industries. Cook’s wilted flowers mourn the cruelty of this practice, while the set of scales, resembling a cross-like figure, marks the period’s countless deaths.
