Tape Artist, Rachel Ward. It's a Sticky Situation....

Austin artist, Rebecca Ward’s signature medium is tape. Doesn’t mater what kind of tape. It could be duct tape or masking tape or even electrical tape. If it’s tape, she can make art out of it. With her amazingly precise execution, the artist does a great job of morphing a simple material into something exceptional. She uses this medium to explore the unique structures of the sites in which her installations are situated. She explained this by saying that her work constitutes a collaboration between a particular space and herself.


She has long had a certain fascination with tape and began to experiment with it to decorate her apartment while she was in art school. She claims that while it didn’t look so great, she was interested in the lines it formed, the stripes and the bright colors. She describes the medium as “incredibly seductive”, “…so bright, shiny and smooth.”





“I think I realized that tape could be a wonderfully suitable medium for installation pieces when I started to appreciate it for both its aesthetic (color and texture) and practical (adhesive, linear) qualities,” she explained.



Ward's work is site-specific, taking its shape in response to the particular details of its venue. “Many things can influence the way an installation looks. Some surfaces can be really tricky to work with in getting the tape to stick and adhere -- brick is like near impossible -- but the easiest surface is drywall,” she explains, adding: “My art is about an interaction with space and the built environment that I'm asked to interact with.






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