Tidal Wave: Kate Tucker on Pearls, Painting and Preciousness
For Tidal Wave, Melbourne artist Kate Tucker was invited by gallery director, Melanie Katsalidis, to work at an unusually intimate scale. Known for a practice that pushes painting beyond the flat surface, Tucker builds works through layers of paint, linen, ceramics and found materials, treating each element as part of a larger physical whole.
Presented with a pair of baroque pearls, objects already complete in their beauty, materiality and value, Tucker approached the commission not as an exercise in miniature painting, but as a new material problem to solve. We spoke with Kate about working within the constraints of the pearl, the tension between preciousness and intervention and what happens when a painting practice encounters the body.
PO8: Your practice is deeply invested in the idea of the painting as a physical, material object, something located through a surface rather than on it. Working on a pearl, a pre-formed object with its own material presence, how did that dynamic shift?
KT: I wanted to find the work through process rather than seeing them as a canvas. I felt inclined to stick all manner of stuff to them, but their small scale and beauty caused me to reconsider. It was interesting to interrogate which parts of my process could be transferred to this very different scale, material and context. It has resulted in a great sense of liberation when returning to my other larger mixed media work.
PO8: You often mix media, digital printed linen inside painted surfaces, ceramics growing out of canvases. Did the pearl invite any of those material confusions, or did enamel on its own feel like a welcome constraint?
KT: I always see constraints as necessary, self-imposing them. The pearls' natural beauty made it a difficult leap to embed them into my process and treat them as an interchangeable part, as I do with most materials. I used the paint to change their texture, rather than seeking pictorial space by doing a painting on them. The mark making is rough and at odds with the preciousness of the pearls. The physicality of that process is also preserved, so rather than seeing the painting as a form of decoration, it’s a record of my tussle to transform these perfect, natural objects into a more malleable medium.
PO8: Your monograph 'A Community of Parts' explores how individual works speak to one another when brought together. A pair of baroque pearl earrings is already a kind of dialogue in miniature, two objects in perpetual relation. How did you approach that built-in conversation?
KT: Fragmentation, collage and changing the physical form of objects are central to my practice, and I use duality to break down hierarchies, question rules and disrupt purity. In this instance, I made the earrings the same, as the tension sits between the pearls, the sculptural hands and the textural interventions. It also exists between the earrings and the display, which has an organic and materially ambiguous quality.
The element that made this most challenging and different for me was the inclusion of the body. I had to consider a human as the ultimate context for the earrings, which I don’t usually do! My work usually incorporates hints of hands, bodies, often entangled with natural forms but never dominating other elements. For this project I was considering the earrings as details within the context of a human, and saw them more as tiny, distilled symbols of nature and creativity.
The history of pearls as symbols of wealth and luxury interested me, as I usually work with fairly low value materials, with the work itself imbuing value to the piece. Having that inverted and being conscious of the innate value of the pearls, forced me to question how my contribution could possibly make such a perfect thing more valuable than it already was. I ended up with the idea that these earrings hold the story of my reckoning with what we value— the thinking, time and skill— that artists can be prone to becoming blind to.
Tucker leaves the pearl’s natural beauty in deliberate tension with the rough physicality of her mark making. In doing so, she draws out questions of perfection and disruption, inherent value and the value created through an artist’s time, thought and touch.
Her contribution to Tidal Wave distils many of the questions that run through her broader practice into something remarkably small and intimate. Worn on the body, the finished earrings carry the physical record of that process with them, tiny objects in which material, artist and wearer continue the conversation.
Kate Tucker’s 'Hold/Held' earrings and accompanying 'Hold/Held' sculpture are both available to view and acquire online and at Pieces of Eight Gallery, Melbourne.
Tidal Wave is on show from 13 to 29 August 2026.
