Inspiration

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Beneath the surface

Cat Fooks’ artworks swing between twoand three-dimensionality, structure and unruliness, colour harmony and riotous discord. She combines unusual substrates with oil paint in both liquid and stiff impasto form to create highly textured surfaces that invite touch. In her Onehunga studio, Fooks explodes and reconfigures her art, cannibalising and repurposing elements of previous works. She combines these fragments with new materials and textures including household and studio ephemera, and then encapsulates them in thick, syrupy paint. Details of the underlying objects are either camouflaged or picked out. They become encrypted, lying sphinx-like beneath the paint skin. The finished works achieve spontaneity and irreverence with swathes of colour, strange bulges and nimbly patterned surfaces. Titles like Elvis or Amulet hint at an image; others – Niggle, Chutzpah, Boo

– are obstinately abstract. Kate Mullins