Jill Tate; Terracotta Thresholds
By Lucy von Goetz
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.
– Rose Macaulay.
We are alone inside the paintings of Newcastle upon Tyne artist, Jill Tate. The scenes are void of figures. Her smoothed and supine terracotta paintings languish openly before us. A tilted chair a surreal welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and reddish, from their shelves; they may fall on the floor, the mugs, the plants, once more, lying ready to the hand. You can hear the echo of the words spoken earlier. They linger in the air. Tate has brushed them away. They die forgotten; the air closing behind them.
A shell is placed outside its bowl onto the table. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which players have taken their leave. What to do with all this stillness? It is a gift, a golden jewel. One’s life to oneself again. Tate balances the conflict between the tranquillity of emptiness and the discomfort of isolation.
In her recent work, Tate has exclusively used the colour terracotta, the Italian meaning, “baked earth”. Tate makes her own paint using linseed oil and natural earth pigments, this allows the materials to be as simple and natural as possible. Terracotta serves as a threshold, between warmth and discomfort, past and present, and between the intimate spaces of human life and nature.
Terracotta abounds in art history, from early Venus figurines to Greek pottery and ancient Chinese ceramics. The thick reddish-brown hue, produced by iron oxide in clay, becomes more than a colour in Tate’s work. It is a pathway to connection. The earthy tones offer warmth and grounding, tying us to the past. The paintings though initially inviting, nod to a primal history. A glimpse of mortality, home, and exile. Like Carl Jung in his, ‘The Earth has a Soul’, where he explains that the so-called “primitive” within us lives much closer to phylogenetic instinct and is thus more inclined to follow Nature rather than go against it the way modern man likes to. Jung states that, “what is needed is to call a halt to the fatal dissociation that exists between our so-called higher and lower being; we must unite the conscious aspect with the primitive”. Tate brings us closer to the raw, to the unbaked earth, terra cruda.
For Tate, terracotta goes beyond aesthetics, she explains the philosophical and material significance of iron oxide itself. Iron is everywhere, present in the earth and our bodies, offering a continuity between the human and the natural world. The warmth of terracotta, derived from the chemical reactions of iron and oxygen, connects the cosmos with the human. A relationship intimate and expansive. Tate uses terracotta as a medium for exploring belonging, from the warmth of a room to the red surface of a star.
Tate notes that a star will almost immediately collapse on itself once iron is introduced, creating an inner shock wave that explodes the stellar body into a bright supernova. Yet all complex forms of matter, every element in the universe that comes after iron would not exist without the nuclear breakdown made by iron’s self-destructing power. Stellar nurseries are full of iron dust that clump together to form future planet cores. Iron in space could be considered the catalyst of galactic creation cycles.
Ochre and the natural earth pigments found in Tate’s work open sacred and complex thresholds. Ochre initiates a psychic negotiation between places, beings, and feelings. It draws us closer to unknown places. Disparate worlds bleed together in wet earth red. Red is known as the colour currency of nature. For Tate, the use of ochres and iron-rich pigments is a way of engaging with the prima materia, the raw cosmic material that links human creativity with the universe’s most elemental forces. The work recalls the early Semitic word for the first human ‘dm or Adam, from adama, earth or soil, often translated more broadly as humankind, or as red earth, common clay, clod of red earth.
Beyond the colour Tate renders her works in, the form of her work engages with the tension between modern minimalism and ancient materials. Mixing elements of raw earth architecture, with its rounded forms and comforting, handmade qualities. They evoke ancient mudbrick and adobe structures. These buildings, often soft and mouldable, provide a tactile contrast to the stark, geometric forms of modern design. This juxtaposition in her work creates a balance between the organic and the ordered, the chaotic and the controlled, reflecting the artist’s exploration of inwardness and outwardness; both in physical spaces and in psychological states.
For Tate, spaces become thresholds, where the inside meets the outside, and the known meets the unknown. Tate speaks about the shoreline, with its endless reshaping by waves, denoting the passage of time and the persistence of nature’s cycles. Tate questions deep time, and the violence of the sea that works to smooth pebbles and buff shells. There is transformative power in nature and in time.
Tate’s spaces offer room for thought. By using minimalist interiors and natural materials she blurs the boundary between internal and external worlds, the spaces we inhabit are deeply intertwined with our inner psyche. Tate’s paintings patrol the space between people, conducting a philosophical investigation into belonging and exclusion, intimacy and estrangement. Tate’s work is not just compelling but also consoling. You can forget yourself and become instead as porous and borderless as the earth, pleasurably adrift on the currents of time.
Works featured (left to right)
Through and Out, 2024, Oil on wood, 120 x 150cm
On the Edge, 2024, Oil on wood, 150 x 120cm
From the Top, 2024, Oil on wood, 150 x 120cm
Thin Skin, 2024, Oil on wood, 40 x 50cm
Floored, 2024, Oil on wood, 50 x 40cm