Judith Tucker
Judith Tucker’s work explores the meeting of social history, personal memory and geography; it investigates their relationship through drawing, painting and writing. The paintings here are excerpts from two recent series.The first series of paintings: Night Fitties explore the play of light and dark and the uncanny transformations of the chalets on the Humberston Fitties that take place after hours as well as notions of vulnerability, precarity, occupation and emptiness. The work considers, in the shadow of recent dramatic political changes, how notions of place and identity are constructed on domestic and larger scales, as reflected by the play on flags and other indications of Englishness. They investigate the relation of social, environmental and energy politics on micro and macro scales, looking out to land and sea and back to the community.
The second ongoing series of paintings: Dark Marsh considers the pioneering salt marsh plants of the Humberston Fitties, Tetney Marsh area, consider plants that are both vulnerable to sea level rise, but that also help to protect the land from flooding. The work is intended to be seen in relation to the Night Fitties work and together it explores human and more-than-human worlds in microcosm and juxtaposition, touching on the play of light, tide and colour, uncanny transformations after dark, and notions of vulnerability, occupation, resilience and reclamation.
Judith Tucker completed a B.A. Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (1978 – 81) and an M.A. Fine Art followed by a PhD in Fine Art at the University of Leeds (1999 – 2002). Between 2003 and 2006 she held an AHRC fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Leeds. In 2018 and 2019 she was a finalist in the Jackson’s Open Painting Prize and in 2019 shortlisted for the Westmorland Landscape Prize. Other exhibition venues include Arthouse1 and Collyer Bristow, London and regional galleries throughout the UK, and further afield in Iasi, Romania, Gdansk, Poland, Brno, Czech Republic, Vienna, Austria, Minneapolis and Virginia USA and Yantai, Nanjing and Tianjin in China. When she is not in her studio, she is Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. She has a long-term collaboration with the poet Harriet Tarlo.