Kate Tucker ‘Tablets’
Melbourne artist Kate Tucker draws on an impressive dedication to abstraction with a collection of works that happily cohabit in a place between painting and sculpture…
We often talk about the motivations of the artist that uses an abstract language to convey their ideas. What is equally important is the way that artworks, without a representation key, allow the viewer to bring their own impressions and assign meaning. In this exhibition, Melbourne artist Kate Tucker, draws on an impressive dedication to abstraction with a collection of works that happily cohabit in a place between painting and sculpture. While somewhat challenging to explain, these wonderfully idiosyncratic objects or ‘tablets’ are tactile and motivate the observer to engage.
Tucker explains how she enjoyed the freedom that allowed her forms to evolve in the studio with this new body of work, rather than being fixed to the parameters of a standardized stretched canvas. She constructs from a hand-formed wooden board and then covers it with printed linen, cotton, and dyed calico. The process of construction is paramount with the accumulation of these layers, combined with fine lines, painted forms, plaited frames and finally a gel coating that both seals her process and marks its’ completion. The chosen marks that are contained in this final stratum, in some cases, pay homage to the stalwarts of the modernist movement with Kandinsky, Matisse and even Cezanne coming easily to mind.
Tucker reaps the ultimate reward for bravely pushing the parameters of her practice and these beautiful objects are strangely familiar and yet also otherworldly. As we know beauty is often found in quirky and irregular forms and this exhibition that runs through until 5 November is a firm case in point.
Kate Tucker ‘Tablets’
Daine Singer Gallery
Basement
325 Flinders Lane
Melbourne 3000, Australia
Wed – Fri
12pm – 5pm
Saturday
12pm – 4pm
5 October – 5 November 2016
Credits: Images courtesy of the artist and Daine Singer Gallery
Photography by Matthew Stanton
Words by Katrina Arent
