Canberra-born, Melbourne-based artist Kate Tucker is forever trying to explore the continuity between artistic form and expression in the digital age. How does our relationship with image change when we know how easily it can be manipulated? Has the human experience of art been replaced with technology? Can we remember how to touch? Held, Kate’s new exhibition at Daine Singer gallery, stirs up all those questions

Kate’s hybrid painting-sculptures wrap paint-stained calico sheets around one another and sit atop a ceramic base. These rigid sheets expose the underlayers that solidify them and bring to (literal) light the constant process of reworking the piece has undergone in production. On first sight, the materials seem raw and simple, but on closer inspection a subtler textural depth reveals itself.

Though largely abstract, Kate’s works embrace and exude a sense of intimacy as human hands twist and flex, cradling pieces of its own fractured ceramic body. Dancing between abstract and figurative forms in the same way a sense of familiarity can slide so easily into impenetrable opaqueness, each piece displays a unique and complex identity.

Like a person becoming slowly more familiar the more you get to know them, each of Kate’s sculptures unpeels a layer of its identity from different angles.

Held by Kate Tucker
Wednesday, February 5th – Saturday, March 7th
Daine Singer Gallery
Rear 90 Moor Street
Fitzroy, Victoria