Neon Parc

Fooks’ practice begins with a routine of scouring streets and op shops for discarded objects. Her studio is crowded with painterly equipment and unexpected finds, from stretcher wedges and paintbrushes to plastic dolphins and makeup compacts. In this new body of work, gilt frames become the focus, their former decorative status gradually obscured beneath successive layers of paint. Reconstructed piece by piece, the frames are absorbed into the paintings themselves, complicating where the painting ends and its support begins. Fooks likens this to the formation of a pearl, with the found object acting as an irritant around which the works slowly take shape.

Colour is determined in part by what happens to be available. Working with mis-tinted house paints, Fooks builds up thick, glossy surfaces, adding over earlier decisions as the paintings develop. No palette is repeated. The resulting surfaces reward close looking, with traces of earlier decisions visible beneath successive layers of paint. Each painting emerges through a process that allows for accident, although the final works carry the weight of considerable time spent in the studio.

For Fooks, knowing when a painting is finished is as much a part of the process as making it. Having spent months on each work, she describes the reluctance to confront the finished paintings, which she sometimes keeps tucked behind the sofa. Naming them becomes a final act of release, allowing each work to acquire its own identity. Fooks is equally reluctant to prescribe how the paintings should be understood, leaving viewers to find their own footholds as they move between the works.

There is something deliberately awkward about these paintings, particularly in the way their salvage materials resist being entirely disguised. The gilt frame, traditionally used to finish and dignify a painting, becomes another surface to work against. Fooks’ interest in the domestic life of objects is evident here, as is her willingness to let materials determine the direction of a work. In ‘Diamonds & Pearls’, the promise of something precious rests alongside the more ordinary business of making do what with is at hand.