The work of Jim Tucker is one of elegant construction and gentle persuasiveness, but also immediately attractive that persuasion is scarcely a requirement for its appreciation.

Jim spent his childhood against the background of post-war shortages and rationing and this has affected his deep respect and aesthetic appreciation of materials. He attended Reigate School of Art but has long since been deflected from his chosen path towards graphic design, towards his true vocation as a constructive artist. Since leaving college Jim has wandered across large tracts of the world from Europe and North Africa and the Caribbean hauling back found materials to be later incorporated into his work. His greatest inspiration however has been from the endless stretches of the Midwest of America and naturally, his native British Isles.

From his experiences Jim has developed his art of three-dimensional assemblage to a high state of quality and refinement. Describing his work as ‘midway between painting and sculpture’ Jim gathers materials from wherever he goes, seeking out the discarded, the abandoned and the once loved. The faded and the fragmented. These include; metal, plastic, wire mesh, broken toys, shoes, crushed cans, machine parts and auto-memorabilia but above all his greatest love is for wood in a multitude of forms.

Every piece so lovingly brought together in Jims work, has been transformed in one way or another by wind or wave, sun or rain. Bleached or battered, distressed or distorted. With rust or flaking paint all have been modulated and mellowed by the simple passage of time. The common factor uniting every single fragment that Jim employs, is that all betray the touch of man at some point in their individual histories. It is from this fact that the uniquely poetic quality of the work stems.

In the works themselves combinations of these pieces are brought together in a gentle geometry of notable craftsmanship and aesthetic subtlety. Coupled with his intuitive feel and love for materials, Jim is a master of scale and composition, of appropriateness and balance. However, it is in the consummate feeling for colour, combined with texture that Jim excels.

One is drawn into these beautifully constructed works by their gentle and poetic nostalgia, their reference to the inexorable passing of time, of childhood memories and summers past. Each work seems to softly conjure an echo of the lyric ‘rescue me’. Indeed every single piece of work that Jim produces does exactly that.