On the Edge/In the Place/With the Earth: Judith Tucker, Painter and More

This lecture will explore and celebrate the creative life and work of the British artist Judith Tucker (1960–2023). Through painting and drawing, Judith Tucker explored the transmitted legacies of forced migration, inherited otherness and cultural dislocation thus making her specific contribution to the field of migratory aesthetics. She expanded the potentialities of oil painting and charcoal drawing on a variety of scales and formats in relation to historically loaded sites of collective and family trauma whilst examining social and human interactions with land, place and the Earth, itself immemorially ancient but tragically vulnerable to human exploitation and irreversible destruction. Her work combined interventions in “landscape” painting with cultural theories of postmemorial subjectivities and the politics of forgetting and erasure.

Judith Tucker was born in Wales and raised in London. She studied Fine Art at the Ruskin (BA Oxford, 1981) and made her professional and personal life in rural Yorkshire, where she led the programme in Contemporary Fine Art at the University of Leeds, at which she had completed her MA and PhD. As an artist-activist and advocate for British art in all its regionality and diversity, she co-convened the network Land2D with Iain Biggs and was a founder member and, at the time of her tragic death, the Chair of Contemporary British Painting. In recent years she collaborated on several projects with free form poet Harriet Tarlo extending the long tradition in British art of walking, place and the visual poetics of word and image. In grief, but with joyous memory of the brilliant artist, the lecture reviews the major series and diverse forms in her work through her innovative materialities that now form the legacy of Judith Tucker, an artist working on the edge, in multiple places and advocating for contemporary ecological and environmental ethics.

Speaker biography

Griselda Pollock is a feminist, postcolonial and social art historian and curator. Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds, she also directed the transdisciplinary Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (2001–21). In 2020 she was awarded the Holberg Prize for her work in feminism and the arts, and the CAA Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art in 2023 having received in 2010 the CAA Distinguished Feminist Award for Promoting Equality in Art. Recent publications include Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University Press, 2022) and WOMAN IN ART: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944 (Yale University Press, 2023). She has curated several exhibitions on the work of Christine Taylor Patten and on Bracha Ettinger (Memory and Migration, 2009) her most recent is Medium and Memory (HackelBury Fine Art, London, 2023 catalogue available) and is currently developing, with many colleagues, a memorial exhibition on Judith Tucker, who was tragically killed in an accident caused by a dangerous driver in 2023. 

Image credit: Judith Tucker in her studio, c. 2000. Image courtesy of the Judith Tucker Estate

Host or Publisher Paul Mellon Centre