Jim Tuck
BA Sculpture – Camberwell College of Arts, 2021
Jim has a research and making based practice primarily concerned with queer identity and the discrepancies between the accepted linear narrative of history and personal memory. Through the absences and fragments of queer histories embodied in objects and sites, he attempts to discover and bring his own inheritance to life in the present. And by exploring and representing ideas of queered relationships and intimacy, he hopes to question the assimilation of queerness into a straight future.
Jim uses this queered archive as both material and process within his practice. He attempts to represent and juxtapose archival fragments, allowing the viewer to tease out and articulate their own narratives and create a personal intimacy by inserting themselves within this historical context. He uses abstraction and improvisation to fold and bend straight time and space. By mixing ideas of public and private, interior and exterior, he plays with form, scale and materiality to question our underlying assumptions of these spaces.
His practice contains made objects and architectural fragments informed by the masculinity of queered minimalism. These made objects are combined and curated with evocative found objects and photographs to queer scale and suggest a distanced, archival intimacy.
Among his work is a map made of denim draped limply from a metal file that pierces a slab of skin-like orange foam framed in aluminium; an intimate image of an ear pressed against glass; a strange concoction of wood, metal, rubber and fabric bound with a bulldog clip hanging like an oversized necklace from a section cut from a bright blue door; and an over-enlarged photograph of a row of welded, rusty files that evokes a city’s high-rise skyline.
Awards and residencies:
Shortlisted for WWF / Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden award, 2021
Instagram: @insta_rchive
"I hope my audience will find something beautiful and interesting and compelling and something that feels familiar but altered, that will make them rethink what they may take for granted in the world around them."
