Judith Tucker has always loved the landscape. She grew up by the sea in Anglesey and her early paintings saw her develop a growing awareness of the power of landscape to evoke unknown memories, creating atmospheric works that are both comforting and disturbing.
The recent series of drawings and paintings evolved after the discovery of photographs belonging to her mother who escaped Germany as a child in the 1930's. Holiday photographs of lidos and beaches inspired Judith to explore the landscapes that her family had visited and she became fascinated by the environment as a powerful metaphor for displacement, a sense of un-belonging, of searching for home.
…"coasts, beaches and latterly the spaces of lido architecture, interrogate the uncanny in landscape, and I would consider that my paintings and drawings contribute in some small way to the aesthetic discourse about art after the trauma of the Holocaust. I read my re-presentations of landscape in relation to notions of ‘transposition’ and against Marianne Hirsch’s considerations of ‘postmemory’."
The works evidence the search to make sense of her 'postmemory', to discover a past that is familiar, and yet not directly experienced. During the 1970's, it was recognised that the experience of being a survivor or refugee of the Holocaust seeped into the emotional and psychological spaces of the next generation. 'Transposition', the intergenerational transmission of trauma, is known to create a legacy in the psychic space of the child. The child carries something unknown, something from the past, shapeless, but present in their innermost being.
Judith Tucker's paintings and drawings are finely balanced symmetries of darkness and light, vertical and horizontal planes, environments inhabited by figures or devoid of them. She obsessively and repeatedly describes moments that, to the casual observer, appear very similar. Her eye selects, like a camera lens, and settles on a viewpoint. In another image, the viewpoint shifts slightly, a different perspective emerges, the pictorial space changes. Drawing and painting is a process of unravelling meaning, discovering memory, discovering spaces where voices and sounds, unseen and unknown, seem to echo from faraway. They are still images, frozen moments from another era, re-presented, re-visited, reclaimed.
You can view Judith's website at: Land 2
click here to download the teacher notes 'Word' format
