Becky Tucker

Hey, yeah, good, thank you. I’ve currently got a show open in Zurich and I’m getting to spend most of summer in the studio, so I can’t complain.

I haven’t been working with clay for all that long. I’ve always made things, but even through my degree I was mainly painting and drawing. I started making these little wax and polymer clay models to work from and they became more interesting than the paintings. I properly started working with clay in 2020. The learning curve is really steep, I found it incredibly frustrating at the start, but also addictive. I think it’s the unpredictability and labour of the process that keeps me here, there’s so much to learn.

Strangely, it’s probably what keeps me connected to the internet. I don’t know if I’d even have social media if it wasn’t such a useful tool for artists. I’m grateful that a lot of people have found my work through Instagram, so I see its value. But I don’t spend much time online, it doesn’t feel that productive to me.

It’s quite different for each work. Generally I don’t properly sketch, they are really just scribbles so I can remember an idea. I’m not very good at working with line, I find it much easier to think in terms of volume, so it’s often logical for me to just start making. Most of the works are coil or slab built, so I change things as I work. The bigger pieces are quite technical, so they require more measuring and planning to account for shrinkage and ensure they fit together.
I usually have a rough idea for how I want to glaze a piece. I do a lot of sampling and testing glazes, but I usually end up working in a quite painterly way, really layering up the glazes so the outcome can be quite unpredictable.

Ahead of making the work for the show, I read My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is by Paul Stanbridge. The book is a part memoir, part fiction charting the author going through grief as he lost his brother to suicide. It’s about his rediscovery of the joy and beauty of life, as he embarks upon researching highly varied topics from mathematics to horses to maps. It resonated with me as in many ways it’s how I approach research — by following seemingly tangential topics, to try understand what it means to be making sculpture now.
I was particularly drawn to an early section of the book where he begins exploring Doggerland, the now submerged landmass in the North Sea where various artefacts have been found. It led me to deepen my interest in archaeology and ancient artefacts, but also to think about mapping connections through time.
A cornerstone of my practice is finding references from vastly differing cultures, periods and aesthetics. I’m interested in finding what unites material practices, and understanding patterns of creation. The depiction of creatures and figures can be found globally, thousands of years and thousands of miles apart, with greatly differing symbolic and functional purposes. It’s clear that the depiction of creatures is enduring and important.
The title of the show, The Quarry refers to the idea of physically mining materials but also mining history. A second meaning of the word ‘quarry’ is prey or the hunted, so for me it’s symbolic of the act of seeking, whether that means physically, or searching for an intangible idea.

I don’t think it’s strictly my intention, but I’m glad it’s often an outcome. It’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like to encounter the work because to me it’s the everyday, it’s what’s around me in the studio and what I think about all the time. During the show we often discussed the works in terms of their otherness, wondering what ‘they’ might think about ‘us’. So, I suppose there’s a discomfort in this idea of judgement.

Yes, anachronism is important to me. I feel like a work has been successful if it’s difficult to place.

It would be impossible to say I have a favourite. Atlas and Harbinger are of course rooted in Greek mythology. Such a significant amount of Western folklore takes inspiration from Greek myths and the titles/words found in the stories are so beautiful, often carrying multiple meanings so they commonly appear in the work. I go through cycles of researching particular periods/cultures, usually because the discovery of an object has lead me there.

No, I don’t think it’s that. I’ve always been drawn to costume, masks and armour for their ability to transform the wearer. There’s something kind of frightening but also playful about dressing up and the illusion of shapeshifting. I’m really drawn to objects that are closely related to the body but are not the body, such as clothing or armour; they can hold power even without the presence of a living body.

The wall colour is influenced by the colour of the strappings on the larger works. The process I used to colour them is a type of solar dyeing with indigo leaf. As you mention, it’s not a typical result from indigo — it usually dyes a really dark blue from the pigment that can be obtained through fermentation and oxidation called indigotin. However, there’s a second pigment you can extract called indirubin that can produce this amazing light purple/mauve.
Indigo has a complex and troubling history: the demand for the dye when industrialisation boomed in the mid 19th century meant that areas with potential for good indigo cultivation were colonised by the most powerful countries in Europe. The high demand in India meant that indigo was prioritised over other crops, leading to famine for local inhabitants.
I don’t know if it’s my job to say what it symbolises, but I was thinking a lot about the relationship we have to materials and their history, what it means to put them in a new context. I often think of ceramic and natural pigments to be sort of muted and earthy, but the colours in this show destabilise that association, perhaps playing into the theme of otherworldliness.