Friendly with Barbara Tuck's daughter as a teenager, I was lucky enough to know Barbara - travelling with her, her architect husband and their three daughters around the South Island in the early 1980s.
My enduring memory of Barbara was of her at the water's edge in Wanaka with a sketchbook, absorbed in the landscape - fixed on her drawing. Throughout the journey, she collected impressions, notes on the landscape she would stitch into paintings on her return home.
Barbara worked from her villa in Arthur St, Ponsonby, in those days, in a studio set above Auckland city. She had a dense and leafy garden, which seemed to be a cocoon for her home, a separation from downtown Auckland just a street or two away.
Delirium Crossing shows Tuck's absorption in landscape as a subject and it is fascinating to see ideas inherent in her paintings echoed in this print - albeit this is not a painting, nor is it quite so tangibly a landscape.
Tuck remembers when as an 18-year-old, she travelled to Australia. How conscious she was that the landscape there was different, "I understood the environment as completely different from what I knew. I was walking on rocks rather than clay."
In Repetitions, there is a sense of ground travelled across, traces of humankind, ecosystems, spirits and knowledge. Tuck's worlds are as informed by her wide-ranging interest in philosophy, poetry, science and art as they are by her own experience. For Tuck, "landscape is not something we form a view of but something to be immersed in".
We can see this in the fragments of detail that suggest ancient geologies and histories, map out narratives accumulated over time. Overlapping layers twist and turn without horizon lines or perspective in a constellation where all time seems to have spiralled into the present.
Known for her exploration of the painting process, in this print we can see that same attentiveness to print media in this work. Shifting between figuration and abstraction, we recognise nets and veiny networks, leaf forms or perhaps fossils. Rich imagery that gives way to marks that show Tuck in the moment - exploring the potential of lithography as a drawing medium.
The exhibition Delirium Crossing at Adam Gallery makes new understandings of Tuck's painting and likewise, enrich the worth of work such as Repetitions held here in the collection by providing knowledge and understanding that expand the work's significance.
• Toni MacKinnon is art curator at MTG.
