Bokarina Beach

Celebrated indigenous artist Michael Cook takes us on a journey through his new home and has us asking; “how real is real”?

Project details

Building designer: MRA Design

Builder: Bliss Homes

Product: Vulcan Cladding - Vertical Grain in Protector - Teak

Timber distributor: Britton Timbers

Photography credit: Michael Cook

Completion date: April 2020

Location: Bokarina Beach, Queensland

Recently featured in Vogue Living Australia, the pared back home of indigneous artist Michael Cook and partner Monika Skelig features Abodo’s Vulcan timber cladding in Protector - Teak; adding warm earthy tones to a minimal palette of glass and concrete.

Designed by MRA Design, the home is almost an essay in dichotomy balancing between materials such as cold concrete and warm timber cladding, textures, and the artist's incredible works of colonialism.

The images here are both of a constructed reality and a real construct: Cook visually documented a house that was briefed to be like a garden villa in the W Bali — Seminyak hotel, then embellished the results with digital inserts of select creature and character from his back catalogue of series.

In the background is our Vulcan timber cladding, in the foreground is #12 from his 2012 collection “Civilised”.

Bokarina Beach Vulcan Cladding Abodo Wood 1

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I took my favourite Aboriginal models Joey [Gala] and Larissa [Toby] out of Livin’ the Dream (2020) - they worked perfectly with perspective and pitch of light in these rooms.