Kate Tucker essay by Charlotte Cornish

Charlotte Cornish
‘Small details intimately observed’
Catalogue essay, KATE TUCKER: A roof, not a room

Kate Tucker’s artistic practice centres on making paintings out of more than just paint. Her gestures toward abstraction can be understood within the realm of non-objective painting where compositions are formed through non-representational gestures that flatten and fracture colours and shapes on the surfaces of her paintings. In recent years there has been a dynamic shift within her paintings and they have come to occupy a status that extends beyond non-objectivity. Tucker’s process has developed around experimenting with the potential of materials and techniques beyond those traditionally associated with painting. These developments have produced an interrelation between two and three-dimensional form, which has seen her paintings begin to occupy a slippery space between being both an image and an object. Layers are no longer only paint on canvas, but are created through an array of materials enfolded on the surfaces over time, producing new textures and forms within her paintings. Three-dimensional arrangements have become more pronounced and expand the paintings beyond the frame, which act to interrogate the surface and support tradition in painting. There is a push and pull tension that presents itself in Tucker’s paintings as they have come to inhabit new materials and take on multidimensional forms – a tension that speculates on the potential of painting itself.

Lay Bare is an artwork made by Tucker in 2015 that presents a juncture in her artistic practice where new materials and techniques became more visibly apparent in her paintings. Lay Bare is composed of a 21 x 26 cm canvas board overlayed with two distinct fabrics – in the background, a bright red polyester thread with a linear patterned texture that runs vertically from top to bottom, and centred atop sits a piece of tight weaved beige linen roughly cut in a somewhat rectangular shape with irregular edges. The board is propped up by two small earthenware supports glazed in a metallic grey that sit uniformly spaced on either side.

Lay Bare stands out as minimal when viewed alongside Tucker’s other artworks. Her other artworks are often embedded with a broader range of textures and colours, where painterly gestures and tactile layers appear to have developed on surfaces over a duration of time. The distinction with Lay Bare is that it is reduced and raw, almost radically so. Lay Bare challenges the visual complexity present in her other artworks with its distinct lack of painterly gestures and limited textures. The painting is formed through the materiality of the fabrics, which have had minimal intervention and appear in a comparatively candid and functional composition.

The presence of new materials in Tucker’s paintings correlates to the development of her hybrids. The hybrids can be understood as a painting that has been constructed and enmeshed to a point that it harnesses both two and three-dimensional form. These multidimensional experiments push the paintings out of the frame – a move that considers sculpture as embedded within paintings and paintings as embedded within sculpture, where the continuation of forms between both seem to become mutually supportive armatures of the same artwork. In its functionally supportive structure Lay Bare proposes a relatively modest hybrid. Yet from this time these three-dimensional sculptural forms started to become elaborate extensions of her paintings and have since come to be consistent within her artistic practice. The development of Tucker’s hybrids demonstrates her ongoing tendency to abstract form by way of fracturing, yet there is a transition that shifts the compositions to no longer occur only on a flat surface. They push beyond the traditional painting process where layers of paint are applied to a surface and extend out to occupy positive and negative space in three-dimensional form. Tucker’s hybrids have formed through her experiments with the potential of materials outside of paint when creating her paintings.

Lay Bare demonstrates more than Tucker’s material and technical developments within her paintings. Its upfront restraint offers viewers a generous opening to reveal how her process is a sequence of non-hierarchical modest decisions built over a duration of time. Lay Bare provides this cue by reducing the painting’s form to a visually minimal simple layered gesture with an effect that differentiates the painting to such an extent that it creates a pause for contemplation. When considered alongside her other artworks this gesture can be seen as occurring many ways with an array of materials. It is these small details intimately observed that are repeated in different ways with differing effects to build the composition of her artworks. Her process is not painting in a traditional sense – it is one of selecting, composing, building, fracturing and forming materials onto and into one another over time through incremental decisions that occur frequently. Her process of building paintings out of more than paint can be seen enfolded many times within the complex layers of all her artworks.

Kate Tucker’s artworks are the outcomes of the possibilities that become present when she surrenders to her process. Instead of focusing on what a final artwork will become, she places emphasis on her process to generate the elements within her paintings. Tucker’s aim is to impart a non-hierarchical approach where materials and techniques are not valued over each other, but are equal in their potential to become an element that feeds into her paintings. The elements influence each other and are interchangeable within her process, becoming a community of parts that guide how her paintings form. She does not like to get stuck on a specific colour, fabric, gesture or moment as it can become stifling. Instead she works with a rhythmic momentum to occupy a state of flux that then enables her experimentation to flourish progressively. The final artworks can be understood as the sum of its parts perpetuating within her process and merging together to create a painting.  

Tucker’s technical proficiency and comprehension of materials allows this flow of experimentation to progress. Some techniques and materials take more time, for example, a ceramic will need to be formed and fired or a bronze will need to be modeled and cast, whereas other techniques such as sketching, collaging and painting are more rapid. Her breadth of skills that have been developed over the course of her artistic career enables her to make precise decisions while trying different approaches. As the elements are being created she will also work with what is already in her studio, for example, combining various parts into assemblages that will be sketched or painted to feed into or become another artwork. It is a process that creates a generative loop where another move evolves progressively. Recently she has been experimenting with photographing studio assemblages to decontextualize the compositions. These photographs have been printed onto fabrics that she then incorporates within the layers to become embedded within the painting’s materiality. Although many of her methods to create artworks are physical and tangible, Tucker also engages with the potential of digital tools to harness different perspectives within her process. Digital photography removes the reality of space and depth, creating a flat and fragmented way to see form, which can assist Tucker to open and disrupt her compositions and figure out the next move. In a way it seems a counter act to her process of building three-dimensional forms that become extensions of her paintings, as the photography creates a removal or flattening. At the same time, it emphasises how her paintings are developed through a process that steadily oscillates between two and three-dimensional forms.

Tucker’s focus on experimentation aims to open up potential ways for the paintings to form. Tucker works on multiple elements at once within her studio to create this openness. Gestures that feel predictable can be disrupted by a change that influences how a painting evolves. For example, when Tucker was making the three large multi-paneled paintings for A roof, not a room, each individual panel was worked on over time without a specific orientation. She would continually flip them throughout their making and come back to each one after a period of time to see through the next layer or move. By reorienting the painting’s perspectives throughout their making she purposefully disrupted the composition as a method to inform her next move. Once the panels and compositions were pieced together the paintings were encircled with hand-plaited frames that act as a sculptural extension to the heavily collaged surfaces that have been built up over time. These sorts of studio experiments are both tentative and decisive, requiring focused attention to material detail and a submission to the breadth of her techniques to lead the way. Her paintings harness an internal balance, while appearing as though they can continue to evolve even when they are also resolved. It is as though her paintings have softly wrestled with an internal and external logic and come to accept harmony in the forms that they take.

There is a self-referential quality embodied within her paintings as new forms spring from ongoing experiments within her studio. A catalyst can be a pre-existing work, part of a ceramic sculpture that is still to be fired, or a specific selection from her collection of fabrics and materials that are organised in a library-like shelf within her studio. The daily undertakings are varied, however her approach is somewhat diaristic in that she regularly re-visits or reworks elements from within her studio as a starting point to a new painting. It recalls Lee Krasner’s approach to collages such as in Milkweed, 1955, where she shredded her older paintings to create new collages with the fragments. Krasner’s approach saw the physicality of her own paintings become embedded within new compositions, a resourceful and self-referential technique when considering new compositions and ways of seeing how another painting can form. It suggests that even if the paintings appear abstract, the materials within the paintings can be imbued with innately personal labour that has been ongoing throughout an artist’s practice. A painting’s materiality does not need to be created through traditional painting techniques to be used as part of a painting; its materiality can express connections to remnants of an artist’s practice and life.

The view that non-traditional materials can form a painting seems a redundant notion to consider within contemporary art. Painting has been more than traditional paint on canvas for a very long time and expanded painting practices, and theories, are widespread. Yet there is a distinct lineage to the feminist art movement of the 1960s that remains interesting when considering non-traditional materials within painting, especially in relation to materials being imbued to reflect personal and political qualities. In particular when considering Tucker’s art practice, the term Femmage coined by Miriam Shapiro and Melissa Meyer in 1977-78, comes to mind. In an essay titled “Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled – FEMMAGE” first published in the magazine Heresies: Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics (Winter, 1978), Shapiro and Meyer outlined the framework for Femmage – “a word invented by us to include all of the above activities as they were practiced by women using traditional women’s techniques to achieve their art—sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking and the like—activities also engaged in by men but assigned in history to women.” They set out fourteen criteria that came to define Femmage where seven should be present in an artwork to qualify. At the time, they asserted that women and non-Western artists were othered in the canon of art history and were largely ignored within the politics of art. The narrow patriarchal view of women’s culture became the framework from which Femmage sprung. It became a declaration that techniques and materials associated with the politics of womanhood and connotations to domestic life should be considered legitimate within art practices and artworks.

The link between artistic and domestic life had not been declared with such emphasis within the Western art history canon prior to Femmage. Today though, many women artists – including Tucker – navigate between artistic and domestic life as a daily exercise. For Tucker, the colliding of these contexts is unavoidable and both inevitably feed into and affect her artistic practice. There is a fluidity between artistic and domestic identity, but there are also frictions that arise when working within fused contexts. Her new solo exhibition A roof, not a room navigates this fluidity and friction as it evolved during Covid-19 restrictions in 2020, an exceptional circumstance that changed the way society functioned and how people lived. The exhibition title, A roof, not a room, came to Tucker when she began working from her carport at home – a roof without the surrounding structures enclosing the space to make it a room. As her artworks for this exhibition developed she was also experiencing the shared vulnerabilities that came to define life in lockdown. Many people felt unsafe outside but also confined inside, even when it was also a privilege to be safe working inside one’s home. For a period of time there was a sense of spaceless-ness as environments originally designed for humans to exist within were deemed unsafe for their intended purpose and became devoid of human interaction. With non-essential businesses forced to shut down, access to art studios was forbidden along with the mental remove that a studio provides to an artist. Tucker had to shift to working from home and created the majority of the artworks within A roof, not a room in the domestic spaces that she shares with her two children.

When viewed with this context in mind Tucker’s paintings in A roof, not a room navigate artistic and domestic fluidity in a way that has not been seen before in her artworks. During this time domestic life was inescapable. The confinement to a domestic space sets up various inadequacies for her process, but they were constraints that gave way to new possibilities and have come to feed into her paintings. In some paintings her treatment of fabrics and the forms within her compositions reflect domestic space more directly. Light on all sides, 2021, and Measured in posies, 2021, sees fabrics drape off the supports and softly extend out and down, reminiscent of a curtain or bedsheet. In Tucker’s Care Banner 1 and Care Banner 2 made at the same time – both are being exhibited in Notions of Care, a group exhibition ending 22 May, 2021, at Bus Projects – unstretched fabrics literally drape like curtains from hanging systems attached to the ceiling purposefully positioned to intersect the exhibition space. In Dream stack, chipped hollow, 2021, linear compositions that seem to resemble window frames and curtains have found their way into the surface and in No fast fixes, 2021, the hybrids are taking on innovative layered asymmetrical forms.

The ongoing repetition of a flower motif interplaying amongst Tucker’s bold and subtle graphic compositions within different paintings throughout the exhibition also suggests the influence of surrounding decorative features. The large multi-paneled paintings embed a contrast to the domestic context in their deliberately sizeable scale as constructing smaller paintings may have been conducive to the limited space within her home. The whole world as one lockdown bookshelf / can we make something of this, 2021, made during this time was borne out of this spatial limitation. It began as a watercolour sketch of her ceramic sculptures that were drying in her bookshelf at home. Tucker scanned this watercolour and printed it onto linen that was then worked into the larger composition. Even if its visibility within the surface is subtle, it is a defiant moment that is somewhat symbolic of the constraints and possibilities of the domestic environment that she was working within. Tucker’s persistent focus on her process enabled her to switch into the mindset of making while accepting the mandatory domestic context. Although it was a unique circumstance, the shifting between domestic and artistic identities is a tension that persists with or without Covid-19 restrictions. There is a responsibility to balance being pragmatic about the realities of life when creating art with actively pursuing an art practice that values experimental intuitive processes to create meaningful artwork. It requires flexibility to allow these different contexts to fuel a process, rather than overwhelm or stifle it.

Tucker allows her paintings to evolve through a process of experimentation that welcomes the potential of what can happen next rather than being fixed on what has already been done. The paintings can be seen as the outcome of the possibilities that come from engaging with materials and techniques beyond those traditionally associated with painting. Through her process Tucker’s paintings come to shape themselves through a distinct visual language that holds its own harmony, while also occupying a speculative space within the broader landscape of contemporary painting.

— Charlotte Cornish, 2021

I would like to congratulate Kate for her exhibition and thank her and Daine for the invitation to contribute a piece of writing.  

Charlotte Cornish is an independent curator, arts writer and art advisor currently living in Los Angeles.