Describing Kate Tucker's works as 'paintings' seems almost shortsighted. The medium's implicit relationship with a bordered, finite, two-dimensionality feels at odds with the Melbourne-based artist's densely layered, fractured, and rearranged works. Emphatically three-dimensional, humbly monolithic, and highly democratic in their form and materials, Tucker's paintings – rendered via acrylic mediums, fragments of pre-printed fabrics, canvas, linen, Chux and cardboard, along with earthenware and slickly glazed ceramic support systems – are at once plinths, prints, collages, sculptures, installations, and frames. They are infinitely layered constellations, colliding and harmonising at impossibly close quarters.

Here, the act of painting is integrated into a work's slab-like substrate, rather than onto its surface. As art historian and writer Helen Hughes frames it, the 'main event' of Tucker's artwork stages a 'tussle' with its supposedly supporting cast; her works 'deconstruct the hierarchies' typically at play in painting.

A Community of Parts is Tucker's first book and points to the evolution of her practice over the last decade. Featuring texts from curators Amelia Wallin and Charlotte Cornish, alongside an expansive conversation between the artist and Helen Hughes, the book comes to life with Matthew Stanton's striking photographic documentation. Assuming the guise of the workbook as much as the monograph, A Community of Parts doesn't so much reproduce Tucker's works, as it nestles in amongst them, elbow to elbow, testing new combinations, arrangements, and sight lines. Everything is dialogic, generative, and unmistakably physical in this purposeful throng of works.