Legacy of a much-missed painter blooms in Leeds and beyond

The life and legacy of the late artist and academic Judith Tucker, who died aged 63 in a traffic accident in November 2023, is being celebrated over the coming weeks.

Events include exhibitions at the University of Leeds, a memorial lecture by Professor Griselda Pollock at the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and the awarding of the first Judith Tucker Memorial Prizes at the opening of The Contemporary British Painting Prize exhibition in Sheffield on 30 November.

Senior Lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Leeds, Dr Judith Tucker was a brilliant painter with a rich and wide-ranging practice rooted in landscape, ecology and memory, a penetrating writer and thinker, an inspiring educator and an energetic convenor of fellow artists.

In her own work, she said, “the journey to a particular place, working on location and then developing that work in the studio have always been central. My paintings and drawings are infused with a sense a sense of being elsewhere than the site of direct experience, of being not there but here.”

Reckoning through painting and drawing with the transmission of the intergenerational trauma of her mother and grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the murder of other members of her family in the Holocaust, Judith Tucker created a postmemorial practice as “an attempt to connect to the past… made in the full knowledge that the connection is impossible.” Griselda Pollock, Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds, describes her as “an artist working on the edge, exploring memory and place: lost, remembered or threatened”.

In two important later series of paintings, Judith Tucker mapped the “human and more-than-human worlds” of the Lincolnshire coast, where together with her partner and collaborator, the poet Harriet Tarlo, she explored the Humberston ‘Fitties’ plotland exhaustively over the last decade of her life.

Judith Tucker and Harriet Tarlo at work at Humberston Fitties Beach on the edge of Tetney Marshes, Lincolnshire. Image credit: Annabel McCourt.

She rendered the coastal ecology of Humberston in its complete sense in these paintings, capturing not only the precarity of life on the edge of the North Sea, but also the sense of a fragile, divided nation, with bunting, St George Crosses and Union Flags festooned from the corrugated iron and weatherboard. The ‘Night Fitties’ series finds the haphazard collection of holiday chalets and caravans that grew up on the seaside plotlands after the First World War in spectral dusk or forbidding darkness. Each work takes its title from Harriet Tarlo’s poems, many of which are in turn constructed from phrases cut from the pair’s interviews with chalet owners and holidaymakers.

Praised by Griselda Pollock as “technically marvellous… and surreal as botanical portraiture”, Judith Tucker’s final collection, ‘Dark Marsh’, depicts the flora of Tetney Marsh. At the time of Judith Tucker’s death, she and Harriet Tarlo were returning from the ‘Fitties’ where they had been working on their new ‘Verges’ series on the sand dunes, empty plots and gardens of the area.

Judith Tucker, ‘Night Fitties’: Why destroy a thing of beauty (2019), Oil on canvas, 60 x 80 cm © The Estate of Judith Tucker.

One of the ‘Night Fitties’ series, Why Destroy a Thing of Beauty?, won a Jackson’s Art Prize in 2020, and is among seven of Judith Tucker’s paintings and drawings that have just been acquired for the University of Leeds Art Collection. Six are now on display in the University’s Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, coinciding with a larger exhibition in the School of Design.

Works including her last unfinished painting from the ‘Verges’ series, Vipers Bugloss, as well as four artists' books made in collaboration with Harriet Tarlo, can be seen in the Space@Design gallery which Judith Tucker helped to establish in the School of Design. A commemorative plaque has been unveiled in Space@Design, and both displays can be seen until 13 December.

Dr Helen Clarke, Lecturer in the School of Design and curator of the show at Space@Design, said:

"The work in this exhibition shines with colour and light, two of the outstanding features of Judith Tucker's painting. The gallery itself, Space@Design, is a tribute to her passion, energy and generosity in supporting creative practice. Judith Tucker will be loved and missed always, and we are very privileged to be able to share her work in the School of Design."

Judith Tucker, ‘Night Fitties’: We came for Barnsley feast week (2023), oil on linen, 60 x 80 cm. © The Estate of Judith Tucker.

Judith Tucker thrived on conversation and collaboration, founding the research network LAND2 with artist and researcher Iain Biggs, and co-founding Mapping Spectral Traces, an international cross-disciplinary group working with and in traumatized communities and contested lands.

A founding member of the artist-run organisation Contemporary British Painting, she was its Chair at the time of her death. With Geraint Evans she co-curated last year’s impressive survey exhibition Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now, which opened in The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery and toured to the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester.

Layla Bloom, University of Leeds Art Curator, said:

"Judith Tucker was endlessly enthusiastic and supportive of our work at The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, involving her students and bringing artists and researchers to visit regularly. She guest-curated two exhibitions at the Gallery: 'All Over the Place' in 2010 and, most recently, 'Arcadia For All' in 2023.

“We miss her dearly. It has been a bittersweet task to share these recently acquired works with our audiences. They are so vivid and full of love for both humanity and the environment."

Judith Tucker, Dark Marsh: Winter Samphire (2020), oil on linen 30 x 40 cm. © The Estate of Judith Tucker.

Judith Tucker’s contributions to the discourse of painting, and her tireless encouragement of her fellow painters, will be commemorated and perpetuated with the awarding of the first two Judith Tucker Memorial Prizes at the opening of the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2024 exhibition at Persistence Works, Sheffield on 30 November.

Selected by Griselda Pollock, Harriet Tarlo and Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid, prizes of £1500 and £3000 will be awarded to a woman artist based in the U.K. whose practice explores the relations between memory, place, environment and landscape through contemporary painting.

A memorial lecture – On the Edge/In the Place/With the Earth: Judith Tucker, Painter and More – will be given by Griselda Pollock at the Paul Mellon Centre, London (in person and online) on Wednesday 27 November.

Further ahead, Darkness Visible, an exhibition proposed by Judith exploring the potential of light and dark within painting, film and sculpture, will be curated by Gavin Maughfling, Paula MacArthur and Lesley Bunch at London’s APT Gallery from 27 March to 13 April 2025.

Also in spring, works by Judith can be seen in a group show which she began work on as a joint curatorial project with Veronica Sekules and Barbara Howey. Plant Power runs at GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn, from 8 March 14 June 2025.

Feature image

Judith Tucker at the opening of ‘Arcadia for All’ in The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds. Image credit: Leeds University Galleries.