Judith Tucker |
Artists Statement
My recent paintings and drawings consider the relationship between ‘landscape’, memory and painting. Painting, both as object and as process, has become a site for my investigations of loss, memory and mourning. I consider a triangular relation between three types of place and temporalities: pre-war photographs, contemporary resorts in Germany and a new, third place between history and memory: re-presentations of the former two through drawing and painting. I read my re-presentations of ‘landscape’ in relation to notions of ‘transposition’ and Marianne Hirsch’s considerations of ‘postmemory’, I also bring into play the implications of John Urry’s notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ and Anthony Vidler’s considerations of the ‘architectural uncanny’. For several years my paintings and drawings employed the metaphor of the border between land and sea, offering as it does possibilities of passage and displacement. I developed this in my recent series of exhibitions entitled Resort; these works were developed after visiting the seaside resort Ahlbeck. In this series I employed the motif of the strandkorb.. They might be seen as a way of bringing the private world into the public realm, in one way they complicate notions of inside and outside by inviting a consideration the domestic in the wilderness, the risk of an intimate space within the basket contiguous with the open expanse beyond. These structures fluctuate between offering a sense of being places of protection and in their very deficiency becoming almost mawkish ciphers of vulnerability. In contrast, my new series, entitled Tense takes a designated leisure space in an enclosed inland location as its starting point; yet, I consider that, this space, too, might be considered liminal. In these, images I re-present lido architecture in so as to form a meaningful connection to the Thüringan forest, notions of the relation of the private in public are developed further, and through this trope I interrogate the uncanny in this tourist landscape. The works focus on particular aspects of the pool architecture that become resonant motifs notably the high diving board, the springboard and the changing rooms. I reflect upon the uncanny disposition of both the actual place and the painted place. While both series reference photography, they also emphasise the difference of painting and drawing as a materialisation of the seen. Through these explorations another set of interrelations become apparent including the paradoxical and anxious associations of grief to leisure and mourning to visual pleasure.
If you are interested in seeing further images please see the following:
www.land2.uwe.ac.uk/jtucker.htm
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fine_art/events/2006/0630/
http://www-art.newhall.cam.ac.uk/gallery/works/tucker2/
http://www.bath.ac.uk/icia/events/?page=event&art_form=Exhibitions&event_id=206
http://www.drumcroon.org.uk/Arch1/Evocations/Evocations.html