JAW COOPER
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”).
“I had many hobbies as a young child, but this obsession with drawing and improvement never let go of me”
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
