My friend and colleague Judith Tucker, who has died aged 63 in a traffic accident, was an artist and art scholar whose work entangled social history, personal memory and place. Her oil paintings and drawings were widely exhibited, including at the Arthouse1, Collyer Bristow and HackelBury galleries in London and at many regional galleries across the UK. She also exhibited in Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, the US and China.
In 2020 Judith won a Jackson’s painting prize, having been a finalist on two previous occasions, and she was shortlisted for a number of other awards, including the Westmorland Landscape prize in 2019 and the New Light prize in 2020.
Most recently she created a dramatic series of night paintings of fragile working-class holiday chalets on the Lincolnshire marshlands (known as “fitties”), exhibited in collaboration with the poetry of Harriet Tarlo. Her final series, entitled Dark Marsh, offered monumental closeups of saltwater plants battling to heal the threatened marshland ecology around the fitties.
Judith was also an innovative curator who was responsible, over the past couple of years, for putting on Entwined: Plants in Contemporary Painting at the 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe and for co-curating Arcadia for All? Rethinking Landscape Painting Now at the Attenborough Arts Centre in Leicester.
In addition she was a senior lecturer in fine art at the University of Leeds, supervising doctoral students in her specialisms of the aesthetics of memory and environmental politico-ethics.
Judith was born in Bangor, north Wales, into an academic and literary family – her mother was Eva Tucker, an experimental novelist and refugee from Nazi Germany, and her father, John, was a British philosopher.
Educated at the North London Collegiate school, she studied fine art at Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, graduating in 1981, and gained an MA (1998) and a PhD (2002) in fine art practice from the University of Leeds, where she held an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship (2003-06) and stayed on as a lecturer.
This year she became chair of Contemporary British Painting, an artist-led organisation she had been instrumental in founding, having been its vice-chair since 2013.
A lover of horses and poodles, Judith had an infectious warmth and wry humour to go with her generosity, intellect and loyalty to friends. She also had a deep determination to make a difference through a combination of rigorous academic research and brilliant creativity.
She is survived by her partner, Harriet Tarlo, by Harriet’s two children, Laura and Ben, and her sisters Catherine and Sarah.
