"...what could be simpler than to take a stack of clear glass slides and mount them on the wall by their very thin edges? This is what Michelle Cooke did in her piece Chiasm, which is one of the first pieces that a visitor sees coming into the show and a terrific beginning to the exhibition. Cooke's piece is lit perfectly and, depending on your vantage point, this etherial work appears and then almost disappears like a game of smoke and mirrors. Chiasm is a wonder of conceptual thinking in consort with a truely delicate touch." Diane Armitage, The Magazine, July 2013

“Cooke’s spare, cerebral drawings make no concession to viewers in search of the quick fix. For every intimation of elegant line, there’s a crude or cursory graphic mark. The works-and passages within them seem to shift between landscape studies and pure abstraction. Even the most literal passage from nature has been subjected to the transforming process at the material surface. Cooke constantly tests the probity of the surface, moving back and forth between formal configuration and material content. The exchange begins and ends at the material surface, and underwrites the authenticity of the image.”
Richard Tobin, art critic. THE Magazine, April 2015

“At a time when so much art is spectacle, it is a relief to have the refuge of Michelle Cooke’s work. Without accessing the wonders of technology and instead using age-old tools of the trade, she makes paintings and drawings that are spare and expressive.”
Lois Tarlow, art critic. Art New England, June/July 2001

“For all the ethereal qualities of art that aligns itself with formal abstact spaces, removed from the world of blood, nerve and bone, this work is robust and concrete in its clarity and strength of purpose.”
Diane Armitage, art critic. THE Magazine, December, 1999

“Cooke’s work is downright masterful.”
Christine Hemp, art critic. THE Magazine, July 1998

“The unbearable lightness of being dances through Cooke’s glass installations…the poetic passage could be compared to the deliberate and interconnected orbit of planets in the universe, and proffers a statement about the frailty of life.”
Lynn Cline, arts reviewer. The Santa Fe New Mexican, October, 22, 1999

“[Michelle Cooke’s] pieces are visually poetic studies.”
Tom Collins, art critic. Geronimo, February 1999.

“Cooke is a fantastic technician creating visions of subtle complexity that entrance the eye. Her colors have superb inner glow, which alludes yo unfathomable space beyond the painted surface”
Jaqueline Hall, art critic. The Columbus Dispatch, 7/5/1998