Nicola Tucker receives award

19th May 2011

Cardiff Artist, Nicola Tucker, thought her chances of getting home to Wales were remote when her plane from Los Angeles had to touch down in Chicago after the wing was struck just after take-off. She is the UK representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation and was in Los Angeles last week to be honoured for her humanitarian work. There, she met with Tom Cruise, who was also being honoured for humanitarian work, and the Chilean miners, being honoured for bravery.

Nicola Tucker, Tom Cruise and his wife Katie Holmes, Lecturer Tammi Rossman Benjamin and her chap Dr. IIan Benjamin photographed last week at the Simon Wiesenthal Tribute Dinner in Los Angeles.
Photo: Bart Bartholomew.

Nicola Tucker with some of the Chilean Miners who were trapped underground when their mine shaft collapsed.

Nicola also met with LA film director, Gabriel Beristain, who has expressed an interest in coming to Wales to film a dramatisation of her mother's book, 'Never Let Him Sleep'. Nicola's mother, Janet Tucker, who writes under the name of E Harvey Hill, has recorded a dark tale from Welsh family history, which has been dramatised by Norma Procter of Gwaelod y Garth. Beristain says he is committed to the film and "can't wait to get on to that mountain in Wales?" to film on location.

Earlier, Nicola introduced the Simon Weisenthal Foundation to the First Minister and Welsh Assembly Government.

Nicola Tucker is currently looking forward to exhibiting with artist Maciej Hoffman in Berlin and Warsaw this Summer.

"Nicola Tucker's Unnamed Installation for Journey Line confronts the audience with the trace of the missing body that stands for millions of lives lost in the Holocaust, an incommensurable immensity of suffering that cannot be directly witnessed. Awkwardly and (of course) always impossibly, the viewer's body tries to stand for just a moment in place of those of the victims arriving at the death camp – painfully conscious of how different must have been their sensory overload, stumbling from cattle trucks amidst moans and cries and the smell of human fear and despair, from the contemplative atmosphere of the hushed and pristine gallery space. Poised precariously between railway sleepers too far apart to cross easily from one to the other, but too close together to step comfortably between, we are suspended in an inhospitable space; we are meant to be discomfited, uneasy, off-balance, knowing that the line of hopeful blue light connecting the timbers, like an ignis fatuus, leads as readily to destruction as salvation. The banal ordinariness of the sewing machine waiting at the end of the line, ominously silent and still without hands to work it, merely underlines the horrific disjunction between our own livingness and the victims humanity reduced solely to use-value, disappearing all too easily between the gaps into the abyss of history.

We are left with the sense of something crucially missed and missing – the trace of the body becomes the trope of impossible witnessing." (Marie-Luise Kohlke (from an unpublished seminar on „Representing the Unrepresentable: Ethical Dilemmas in Depicting Trauma, Sept. 2010, Swansea University)

Article written by Norma Procter

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