Artist Spotlight: Rebecca Tucker

Rebecca Tucker is an artist based in South London. Working predominantly in paint, she creates artworks that sits between abstraction and representation, inviting viewers to look closely and discover something new each time they encounter them.

A long-running interest in Rebecca’s work is the relationship between images and perception. She is fascinated by how viewers create meaning from relatively small amounts of visual information.

This interest dates back to her degree show, which consisted of largely abstract paintings based around horizontal lines. “As soon as you have a two-dimensional surface and you put a line on it, people read it as a landscape,” she explains.

This fascination remains present in her current paintings, even though the imagery has changed. Her recent works feature structures resembling greenhouses, yet Rebecca sees them simultaneously as abstract arrangements of paint.

“When you go up close, it’s so fundamentally abstract paint marks,” she says. Rather than creating representational paintings, she wants to draw attention to the act of seeing itself, stating, “I really want to play with people’s perception of what they’re looking at.”

Although her paintings often look highly controlled, Rebecca describes her process as a balance between structure and unpredictability. She creates each work in three distinct stages: an expressive background layer, drawn linework, and a final layer of carefully painted white forms.

The first stage is loose and intuitive. Diluted acrylic paint is washed onto the surface, creating transparent layers that dry in unexpected ways. “I like not quite knowing what’s going to happen,” she explains. “The less predictable it is, the better.”

The white shapes are matt and opaque, appearing as negative space, while in reality they sit on the surface of the painting. “I kind of love that,” she says. “Your eye is telling you one thing, but the paint is doing another.” The result is a body of work built around contrasts: abstract and representational, loose and controlled, transparent and opaque.

Rebecca rarely begins painting with a fixed outcome in mind and has become increasingly comfortable allowing works to develop through experimentation, although this wasn’t always the case. In 2022, she undertook the Turps off-site painting programme, hoping to simplify a practice that she felt was moving in too many directions at once.

“I went onto that course thinking they were going to straighten me out,” she says. Instead, she received the opposite advice. Rather than narrowing her interests, she was encouraged to keep exploring them and trust that connections would emerge.

Alongside her interest in perception, Rebecca’s work is informed by ideas of place and memory. Many paintings are linked to specific locations, often recorded through geolocation so they can be revisited in the future. Some locations are well known, such as Kew Gardens or Wisley, while others are less obvious. What interests her is not just documenting a place, but capturing the experience of being there at a particular moment.

Currently she’s working on a project exploring locations in northern France connected to First World War battlefields. “Driving through these locations, I was really struck by how beautiful these places are,” she says, “and then you realise that you’re driving through the Somme.” The challenge, she explains, is finding a way to hold both realities within the work.

But with a solo exhibition planned for October on the Suffolk coast and several new bodies of work developing simultaneously, she is happy to trust the process. “I don’t know what my paintings will look like in a year’s time,” she says, “but I know there will be an evolution.”

Rebecca Tucker’s work is available to view and purchase at https://exhibtd.com/artists/rebecca-tucker

Featured image: Rebecca Tucker, Kew XXIII part 2 (detail), Acrylic on wood, 2026