Artist Portfolio Jaw Cooper

Life, death, magic and Rupert the perverted chinchilla: Gary Evans steps into the LA-based artist’s alternate reality

JAW Cooper can tell you the exact moment she got into art. Her parents worked in ecology and evolutionary biology, specialising in freshwater invertebrates. Her parents’ research took them around the world, so Cooper grew up “somewhat nomadically.”

She and her younger sister were free to explore their surroundings. In Ireland, she searched for oysters in the caves of Oysterhaven. In California, she fished mountain rivers with bare hands till her fingers went numb. In Kenya, she “bestowed unwanted attention” on all kinds of animals (“sorry, small wild tortoise who lived in our front yard in Nairobi, that I washed your shell every day”).

Her mother also practised scientific illustration. Cooper, aged six years old, spent a summer at a research laboratory in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Here she watched her mother draw birds in great detail, and was “fixated.”

“It seemed like such a mesmerising trick to make an image appear using only a blank piece of paper and lines, but I determined I could perform this magic too, if I took a methodical approach to learning.

“I drew grids on paper and then drew a cat in each box, trying to improve on the previous one each time and figure out what worked and what didn’t. I had many hobbies as a young child, but this obsession with drawing and improvement was the only one that caught hold and never let go of me.”

TOUGH TIME AT COLLEGE

Cooper attended Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. She doesn’t remember her time there with any great fondness. But the college was expensive so Cooper felt that she had to make the most of it, and worked hard… too hard. She didn’t eat properly and went without sleep. It’s an environment she wouldn’t recommend to others.