‘Slow Dance Forest Floor’ is one of a body of works Cooke made using boxes that often incorporated mysterious organic-looking material and found objects – such as bones, vegetation and sand. In this work, a perspex box projects from a semi-abstract oil painting depicting the rain forest. The combination of the painting and the box creates a number of dualities – present and past, organic and synthetic, fertile and uncontrolled versus the clinical, rational construction of the box. A dialogue is established between an artistic understanding of nature and the scientific one suggested by the species in the box. At another level, as in much of his work, Cooke here draws attention to the vulnerability of the earth’s ecosystems