Kate Tucker
Fragment, unknown
11 March - 18 April 2026

Kate Tucker’s Fragment, Unknown is a diverse grouping of ambitious works across media, in which she integrates practices of sculpture, painting and installation to explore ‘fragmentation’—both material and imaginary. Tucker’s works draw inspiration from anonymous fragments of historical glassware in the V&A Museum collection. They reflect on the possibilities of what can be stirred through encounters with undefined material traces of disparate historical periods, objects that remain approximate rather than anchored to fixed sites of knowledge.

This new body of works furthers Tucker’s experiments with aggregation and layering of clay, paint, textiles and steel—making, fracturing and recombining material elements in a manner that subverts expected orders. Her process emerged from a desire to rethink the material processes of traditional painting onto flat, pre-stretched linens. Rather than working to create a picture within a defined area and surface, each angle and layer of Tucker’s artworks is treated as an explorative process that morphs the form and sensibility of the work. The result is an accumulation of physical and pictorial impressions, where familiar traits of painting and sculpture are swapped, shared, and re-discovered through clusters of colour and material.

Kate Tucker is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist. She has held solo exhibitions at Daine Singer, Cathedral Cabinet, Bus Projects, Galerie Pompom, Art Stage Singapore, Chapter House Lane, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Platform and Helen Gory, and group exhibitions at NADA New York, Sutton Projects, Dutton Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Castlemaine Art Museum, Swan Hill Regional Gallery, Ararat Gallery TAMA, McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery, Murray White Room, La Trobe Art Institute, Geelong Gallery, Penrith Regional Gallery, Caves, Tristian Koenig, SPRING1883, Incinerator Gallery, Bus Projects and LON Gallery. In 2026 Tucker will hold solo exhibitions in Melbourne and in Sydney in a collaborative exhibition between Daine Singer and Darren Knight Gallery.
Tucker is recipient of the 2022 Sunshine Coast Art Prize, and has been a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Len Fox Painting Prize, Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, The Substation Prize, Albany Art Prize, Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, The Churchie Emerging Art Prize, Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards, and The Archibald Prize. Her work is held in collections including Artbank, Shepparton Art Museum and Bendigo Art Gallery. Tucker graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2009.
In 2024 Perimeter Editions published A community of parts, a monograph on Tucker’s evolution of practice over the last decade.

KATE TUCKER ARTIST TALK
1pm SATURDAY 18 APRIL

ALL WELCOME, REFRESHMENTS PROVIDED

“Tucker’s ease in combining unorthodox materials confounds any preconception as to the strictures of medium. Just as we begin to read a work as a painting, we must turn course: the ceramic support pushes it towards sculpture. Similarly, reading a freestanding sculpture pushed up against the wall flattens its planes, reducing a tangled web of curves to a painterly composition of arching lines. The effect of this is a levelling: we are all in the same place before Tucker’s work, led simply by a dedication to ceaseless material experimentation and the precise hand of a master colourist.”

— Hugh Magnus, catalogue essay

READ THE CATALOGUE ESSAY BY HUGH MAGNUS

“Surfaces are layered, fractured, recombined; forms gather without settling into a stable order. Paintings slip their frames, objects extend into space, fragments accumulate without resolving into a coherent whole.

Tucker’s work is structured around fragmentation—not simply as a material condition, but as a way of holding form in suspension. Drawing on anonymous fragments of historical glassware from the V&A Museum collection, the works remain deliberately approximate, detached from fixed contexts or stable meanings. Materials are built up, broken apart, and reassembled so that each element retains a degree of independence. The result is accumulation rather than reconstruction—forms held together without closure.”

— Stavros Messinis, M-ARTLENS