Low Lying: painting and poetry from the saltmarsh Judith Tucker and Harriet Tarlo
5th – 22nd November
Monday to Friday 10 am - 8 pm & Saturdays 10 - 5 pm
Westminster Reference Library 35 Saint Martin's Street London WC2H 7HP
Low lying emerges from our continuing collaborative cross-disciplinary work on the east coast at Humberston near Cleethorpes. It brings together paintings and poems relating to the plants of the estuarial marshland and the human habitations just above it. We have worked on the Humberston Fitties, one of the last remaining functioning plotlands in the U.K., for several years now, exploring the often self-built chalets, shacks, and sheds that lie low behind marshy beach and dunes, on a coast threatened by flood. Here we present recent work relating to the Fitties at dusk and in the night-time. These are shown next to new poems and paintings of the pioneering salt marsh plants of the area, plants that are both vulnerable to sea level rise, but that also help to protect the land from flooding. The work explores human and more-than-human worlds in microcosm and juxtaposition, touching on the play of light, tide and colour, uncanny transformations after dark, and notions of vulnerability, occupation, resilience and reclamation. . Judith Tucker is a painter concerned with landscape, place, environment and memory. Recent exhibitions include Made in Britain Gdańsk 2019, Jackson’s Open Painting Prize shortlist 2018/19, the Sino-British Biennial, Yantai, China 2018. She is co-convener of Land2, a research network of artists who are concerned with radical approaches to landscape and vice-chair of Contemporary British Painting. When she is not in her studio, she is Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, University of Leeds.
Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic. Poetry publications include Poems 1990-2003 (Shearsman 2004); Nab (etruscan 2005); Poems 2004-2014 (Shearsman 2015); Field (Shearsman 2016) and Gathering Grounds (2019). She is editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011). She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has collaborated with Judith Tucker since 2011 and together they have published four artists's books with Wild Pansy Press: sound unseen: poems and drawings (2013); behind land: poems and paintings (2015); outfalls: poems and drawings (2018) and neverends: poems and paintings (2018).
