In The Open | Harriet Tarlo & Judith Tucker

Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic with an interest in landscape, place and environment. Her publications include Field; Poems 2004-2014; Poems 1990-2003 (Shearsman 2016, 2014, 2004); Nab (etruscan 2005) and, with Judith Tucker, Sound Unseen and behind land (Wild Pansy, 2013 and 2015). She is editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) and special poetry editor for Plumwood Mountain 4:2 (2017) https://plumwoodmountain.com/. Critical work appears in volumes by Salt, Palgrave, Rodopi and Bloodaxe and in Pilot, Jacket, English and the Journal of Ecocriticism. Her collaborative work with Tucker has shown at galleries including the Catherine Nash Gallery Minneapolis, 2012; Musee de Moulages, Lyon, 2013; Southampton City Art Gallery 2013-14; The Muriel Barker Gallery, Grimsby and the New Hall College Art Collection, Cambridge, 2015. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

Judith Tucker is an artist and academic, her work explores the meeting of social history, personal memory and geography; it investigates their relationship through drawing, painting and scholarly writing.  She is senior lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. She has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad. Recent exhibition venues include London, Sheffield, Cambridge and many other regional galleries throughout the UK, and further afield Brno, Czech Republic, Vienna, Austria, Minneapolis and Virginia USA and Yantai, Nanjing and Tianjin in China. She is co-convener of the Land2 and of Mapping Spectral Traces networks and is part of Contemporary British Painting, a platform for contemporary painting in the UK. Tucker also writes academic essays which can be found in academic journals and in books published by Rodopi, Macmillan, Manchester University Press, Intellect and Gunter Narrverlag, Tübingen.

In Outfalls Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker present poems and drawings from their collaboration on the Louth Navigation in North East Lincolnshire. Through juxtaposing open-form poems and monochrome drawings they explore the relationship between the River Ludd and the canal itself as its industrial past becomes absorbed into semi-wilderness, creating niches for local flora and fauna in its culverts, bridges and locks. This is a landscape full of criss-crossing lines of water, lines which run parallel and intersect with the energy lines carrying gas, oil and electricity above and below land. They add their own lines, written and drawn, to these pre-existent lines, to take creative transects (as the canal is a transect) through the many lives, the full biota, of fen and river, canal and haven.