Cat Fooks

Cat Fooks’ new exhibition takes its title from the pseudonym of Thomas Hill, an Elizabethan astrologer, cosmologist and author of the 1577 guide, The Gardener’s Labyrinth.

For Fooks, who is charmed by Mountain’s advice to grow cucumbers on trellises, gardening provides a compelling analogy for painting. You must ‘prepare’ the field, in order to have anything happen. Many more arduous analogies for painting exist. Fooks refers to a comment by artist, Cecily Brown:

I’m a great believer in the carpentry idea of Philip Guston, that most of the time you are not exactly slogging away but chipping away, not really knowing if it’s going well or not.

In horticultural terms, Fooks’ ballroom-scale basement resembles not a manicured urban courtyard but a wild meadow of unkempt hedges and plenty of deadwood. The studio, which she has now occupied for nearly 15 years, has become inseparable from a belligerent journey founded in habitual behaviour and self-imposed exile. Fooks is attuned to reconstitution. She pillages crops and reapplies elements of her previous output. The studio is a morass of painterly accoutrements: frames, stretcher-wedges, pencils and paintbrushes that one way or another eventually migrate into the paintings.

In the midst of Fooks’ distinctive use of colour and visceral texture, is a concerted emphasis on the frame. Historically the function of the frame of a painting has been to demarcate the space of the art work from the space of the world. In contrast, Fooks’ flagrant treatment of the frame reflects her appreciation for the porosity of life and art. Fooks’ paintings, like her studio are designed to eliminate what Guston described as ‘the time span between thinking and doing’. They are playgrounds of serendipity, necessarily dumbfounding to provoke what has been described as the only appropriate response to a painting — ugh or ahh?

Cat Fooks was born in Kirikiriroa Hamilton in 1976 and graduated from Unitec Te Whare Wananga o Wairaka in 1999. Her first solo exhibition, Pleasant St, was held at Anna Miles Gallery in 2016. In 2023, Fooks curated the exhibition, Luff, for The Arts House Trust. Recent solo and public gallery exhibitions include Deadweight Loss: The Value of Making, Objectspace, 2020; Cake Walk, Neon Parc, Naarm Melbourne, 2021; Cake by the Ocean, Ramp Gallery, Wintec Te Pūkenga, 2022; Living Room, Objectspace Miles Warren Gallery, Ōtautahi Christchurch, 2023; and Mr Plimsoll, Anna Miles Gallery, 2024.