Barbara Tuck

Barbara Tuck’s small, exuberantly populated paintings are units of entanglement. Like embroidered samplers or plates of an imaginary botanical atlas, they collapse multiple scales and perspectives onto a single surface. Drippy capillaries and scalloped buds draw you in amongst spreading, branching structures and scumbled smudges. Tuck’s modus operandi is akin to fermentation. Her loose handling keeps forms cloudy and tantalisingly inconclusive. Countering this indeterminacy, the searing palette unifies the very different pictorial scenarios of each. Together, these paintings read as a single work in six parts.

Oscillating between closeness and distance, Tuck’s paintings address an extreme and discombobulated world. When talking about them, she refers to refugia. Tuck first encountered the idea when making her 2017 Plume of Steam paintings, which contemplate the siliceous sinter formations at Lake Rotomahana, better known as the Pink and White Terraces, Ō-tū-kapua-rangi and Te Tarata. A refugium is a place where life survives catastrophic environmental change. For Tuck, refugia and spaces that emerge in the act of painting are related — both are microcosms where intricate patterns of connection persist as worlds transform.

Barbara Tuck was born in the Waikato in 1943 and graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau in 1965. Tuck’s work has been exhibited in key surveys of painting in Aotearoa since the 1980s. Her paintings are held in public and private collections in Aotearoa and overseas including those of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Manatū Aorere and Te Papa Tongarewa. In 2022-23, Barbara Tuck – Delirium Crossing, an exhibition and publication developed by Anna Miles, Ramp Gallery WINTEC and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery was shown at Ramp Gallery, Adam Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery. Recently Tuck’s paintings have been seen in exhibitions such as Reclaimed Land: Tāngata Tiriti Taiao at New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata, Toi Art at Te Papa Tongarewa, A Moment to Hold at the Arts House Trust and Birdland: Te Kāhui Manu at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.