Kate Tucker 'A roof, not a room'

“With my studio shut, I tried to make work in my carport, when it was windy, dust blew on the paintings. That structure was the perfect symbol for the conflicting emotions fighting it out in my head. I’m so privileged to have a safe and cosy home, many don’t. I’m so lucky I’m an artist, I will survive this, I’ll turn it into something. I’m so grateful for all this extra time with the children. But a roof is not a room, and the difficult feelings, and the dust, and the loss of control, finds its way in.

These works were born of limitations. A raw, collective vulnerability, a future suddenly different, the past gone for good. Missing non-places, open ended journeys, people. Calendars lost their chaotic clumps and turned to endless empty boxes, and the whole world wondered what was next.

At home, clay sculptures were drying one at a time on my bookshelf, stained fabrics hung over buckets outside, partially assembled patchworks replaced people on the couch. Without the compartmentalisation of work and life, the tension between domesticity and abandoning to artistic practice became the subject of the work. Watercolours started depicting the sculptures, and the books around them, the work looped in on itself. Small enough to be made on the kitchen table, images were later scanned and printed, much larger, onto linen.

In the finished works, it’s difficult to discern which elements are made of what, or in which order they were applied. The surface captures some of the material characteristics of the various layers, but also robs them of others. The sculptural nature of the paintings speak to the clay bases, the surfaces of which have been glazed such that they look painterly. The paintings and sculpture thus swap traits, they exist to support and explain each other.

This non-hierarchical compression of acts and elements references broader artistic practice, and the necessity to emphasise a nurturing continuum, rather than any individual work. A kind of mash up of psychological space and physical structures, these works speak to the strange loss of control we have all felt.
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