Kate Tucker 'Thinking with my hands'

Kate Tucker
Thinking with my hands
3 October - 31 October 
Opening 3-5pm Saturday 3rd October

Darren Knight Gallery, presented in association with Daine Singer
840 Elizabeth Street, Waterloo 
Gadigal, Sydney

Kate Tucker’s paintings shift and fracture then recombine elements in a manner that subverts expected order. Materials are manipulated so as to maintain a rawness and familiarity whilst taking on foreign characteristics. The result is a compression of stuff, physical and pictorial, where traits are swapped and shared, and the painting is located through rather than onto the surface. 

Tucker’s recent painting process has shifted towards building slab-like substrates through repetitive layering of various materials. This process emerged as a reaction to the restrictions of painting traditionally onto pre-stretched linens. Rather than working within a defined area and surface, each layer became an opportunity to change the form as well as the content of the work. The result is a series of ‘tablets’ – irregularly shaped paintings that represent an accumulation of numerous material based experiments, rather than the realisation of a pre-conceived idea. The freedom afforded by this has impacted on the way Tucker uses paint to form compositions and make marks. As paint is used to stain calico, which is then wrapped and plaited around the substrate, any painting that is done with a brush must co-habit with a different iteration of itself. Similarly, fabrics that are digitally printed with images of other works are used, sometimes images of earlier versions of the actual painting they become part of.

The ambition to marry or equalise opposing elements points back to the conundrum of making paintings in the digital age. Tucker has been attempting to transfer some of the opportunities of digital mediums across to painting and has chosen to do this through process rather than visual cues. In these works elements may be stripped of context and casually combined, but unlike in Photoshop, the physicality of the materials means the painting grows with every layer. The ambiguity of the finished surface is difficult to translate through photography, which adds a final iteration to the loop of analogue and digital.