Kate Tucker
Oddments
5 October - 9 November 2024

Kate Tucker’s solo exhibition Oddments brings together a body of ‘hybrid’ sculptures comprising plinth-like forms stacked with ceramic bases and paintings, as well as wall-based paintings embedded with ceramic forms and integrating sculptural framing. The works are the result of a process of material experiments with clay, paint and textiles, which aggregate and layer into surface and support-like arrangements.

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 an accumulation and compression of stuff, both physical and pictorial, where traits are swapped and shared. Here, the act of painting is integrated into a work’s slab-like substrate, rather than onto its surface. As art historian and writer Helen Hughes frames it, the ‘main event’ of Tucker’s artwork stages a ‘tussle’ with its supposedly supporting cast; her works “deconstruct the hierarchical division between … painting and frame, or sculpture and plinth”.

Kate Tucker is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist. Her recent projects include 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 Melbourne Art Fair, 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. 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.

“My works form with the purpose of accommodating each other. Some become support systems or structures that house and enfold other more precarious elements, with the relationship between materials and forms always non-hierarchical and interconnected.”

— Kate Tucker

“Many of the titles in Oddments are drawn from vintage instructional arts and craft books written for children, with titles used as departure points for works (for example, A strip will curl and Shapes to float on coloured water). These books emphasise a resourceful, handmade, accessible and experimental approach to art-making. My work is subject to an automatic drive towards skill and perfection, curbed by a methodology that deliberately elevates amateurism by introducing new challenges. The errors and inconsistencies that arise from physically making my work are often integral to the development of new forms. Other titles in this exhibition are numbered, as I seek to anchor each work into an ongoing lineage of similar actions, rather than emphasise any singular work. Some are named from quotes directly spoken to me, like “don’t over think the corollaries,’ advice from my aunt who reminded me of the risks of over analysing the purpose of my work.”

— Kate Tucker

“Fabric, glass and ceramics nest inside densely constructed wooden substrates and forts, bandaged with fabric, glue and paint. Paintings are assemblages of various iterations of gesture, paint and process, with some parts left raw and others layered until slab-like. The works defy definition by their materials or form, instead existing to play roles to each other.”

— Kate Tucker