Judith Tucker

Biography

Judith Tucker is a painter whose. practice explores the meeting of social history, personal memory and landscapes; it investigates their relationship through drawing, painting and writing. Her latest work is collaborative and interdisciplinary. Her work addresses major questions of ecological importance through contemporary collaborative cross-disciplinary practice in poetry and fine art.. She is vice-chair of Contemporary British Painting and was. selected to represent this group of painters in China for a four-museum show of Contemporary British Painting. Her two current collaborative projects Projectfitties and Outfalls have involved extensive creative work with communities. In 2018 and 2019 she was a finalist in the Jackson’s Painting Prize and in third time lucky in 2020, she was awarded the Scenes of Everyday Life category prize. In 2020 she was shortlisted for the New Light Prize and in 2019 she was shortlisted for the first Westmorland Landscape Prize exhibition. In 2018 she was selected to be one of ten UK artists exhibiting in the inaugural Yantai Biennal, China. Other exhibition venues include Arthouse1 and Collyer Bristow London and many 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.  As well as being in her studio, Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Leeds.

Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic with interests in landscape, place, environment, ecology and gender and extensive critical and creative publications. Her renowned anthology The Ground Aslant is taught extensively and regarded as a key intervention in the field of Radical Landscape Poetry and ecopoetics. Working closely with collaborators, especially the visual artist and academic, Judith Tucker, she engages in place-based projects with extensive local engagement and national and international exposure (China; the U.S.; Belgium; France; Poland; Romania). These have been gathered under the title, “Landscape / Art / Poetry in the Anthropocene” and selected as an Impact Case Study for REF 2021. This work has been funded by the Arts Council; the British Council, HEIF funding; North East Lincolnshire Council; Arts Meridian; Louth Navigation Trust and Sheffield Hallam and Leeds Universities. She is s Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics at Sheffield Hallam University .

See Judith and Harriet’s Lockdown Interview here -

About this work

This selection of paintings includes 3 from the series Behind Land and one from the series Night Fitties all chalets from the Humberston Fitties

Fitties originally means saltmarshes. The Fitties plotlands at Humberston were, like much of the low-lying land around the mouth of the Humber estuary, carved out of saltmarsh. They lie low behind marshy beach and dunes, a quirky domestication of land always liable to flood, to a return to its former state. Here, since between the wars, local people and visitors have erected their diverse dwellings with individualistic names and styles, in order to enjoy the simple, restorative pleasures of seaside life. The larger paintings contextualize the Fitties in the wider marsh and beach land around Humberston, while the smaller paintings and accompanying texts by Harriet Tarlo, see in the artist books evoke the past and present, exteriors and half-hidden interiors of the holiday chalets. They speak too of the relationships between people and place from the wild and planted foliage to the found poems taken from the names given by the owners.