Hettie Judah – författare

'Hettie Judah’s enthralling and important book expands a male-centred art history to include mothers as subjects and symbols, makers and myths' Jennifer Higgie 'One of the most electrifying and important books I have ever read. Hettie Judah takes us on a rich, comprehensive, generative, beautifully written journey through the works of art that have made the invisibility of real motherhood and maternal subjectivity visible. Every sentence and work crackles and sparks. I didn't want it to end. Stunning, urgent and extremely inspiring. We all need this book' Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence'An important and eye-opening book grounded in Judah's extensive experience and research. I knew some artists in this book already, but didn't know many others, and this is a book I will keep close and refer to time and time again. As a writer and as a mother, this is personal too. It is time motherhood comes out of the margins and we see, hear and talk about the extensive invisible labour, joy, pain of mothering. This book is a much-needed addition to the canon' Dr Pragya AgarwalExploring maternity through the work of artists from prehistory to the present day, Acts of Creation addresses the abiding mother-shaped hole in art history. Long taboo, lived experiences of motherhood – and all that accompanies it – are now the subject of urgent discussion. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood delves into the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 150 artworks, from ancient goddess artifacts to contemporary interpretations of pregnancy in the present. While the Madonna and Child archetype has dominated Western art, we rarely encounter art about real motherhood, in all its raw, unfiltered complexity. Renowned author and curator Hettie Judah examines how shifting ideals of motherhood have been constructed and promoted through visual culture. Moving into the 20th and 21st centuries, it also looks at how women artists – among them Barbara Hepworth, Jenny Saville, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Betye Saar, Suzanne Valadon, Louise Bourgeois, Carrie Mae Weems – have worked to subvert these ideals and reclaim the narrative. Women have long been told that they cannot be both an artist and a mother: here the artist mother is instead addressed as an important cultural paradigm. Acts of Creation explores lived experience of motherhood – and of not becoming a mother – offering a complex account that engages with ongoing concerns around gender, caregiving and reproductive rights. Published to coincide with the acclaimed Hayward Gallery touring exhibition of the same name, Acts of Creation is an engaging, thought-provoking and richly illustrated must-read on the evolving discourse on motherhood, offering a fresh perspective that challenges conventions and inspires change.

Lavishly illustrated and exquisitely deisgned, this book opens with a stunning series of images of style icons – historic and modern – wearing their favoured emerald jewelry. As befits a prized gemstone that is twenty times rarer than diamond, here we see together, for the first time, pieces worn by celebrities ranging from filmstars to royalty, all alongside classic images of emeralds from art, advertising and fashion, celebrated in a text by Franca Sozzani, editor of Vogue Italia . The second part of this major volume showcases more than forty of the world’s most significant and famous pieces of emerald jewelry, including many previously unseen designs from private and royal collections. Historic creations that are up to 5,500 years old are represented alongside all the modern jewelry houses. The third and final part of Emerald tells the story of the emerald trade from mine to market, illustrated with specially commissioned photography taken across four continents.

Unearth the secret lives of stones in this dazzling cabinet of curiosities exploring the fascinating stories of 25 spectacular rocks and gems.Delve into a world of gemstones, rocks and minerals to discover the golden amber that once dripped as liquid resin in prehistoric forests, capturing ancient creatures for eternity. Find out how deep-blue lapis lazuli has been prized for thousands of years and used to make a rare paint pigment by artists during the Renaissance and discover the amazing magnetic properties of lodestone and how this helped Chinese sailors navigate the oceans over 2,000 years ago.Covering geology, history, myth and folklore, renowned art-critic Hettie Judah brings the stories of stones to life, with beautiful illustrations by award-winning artist Jennifer N R Smith. All stones have a story to tell - - stories that can teach us about the history of the planet and our own human past.

'A delightful storybook . . . a portrait of our whole world created from the contents of the ground' Literary Review'A real cabinet of curiosities' Sunday TimesFrom the hematite used in cave paintings to the moldavite that became a TikTok sensation; from the stolen sandstone of Scone to the unexpected acoustics of Stonehenge; from crystal balls to compasses, rocks and minerals have always been central to our story.3,000 years ago Babylonians constructed lapidaries - books that tried to pin down the magical secrets of rocks. In Lapidarium, renowned art critic Hettie Judah explores the unexpected stories behind sixty stones that have shaped and inspired human history, from Dorset fossil-hunters to Chinese philosophers, Catherine the Great to Michelangelo.Discover why alchemists sought cinnabar and sulphur. Unearth the mystery of the tuff statues of Rapa Nui, the lost amber room of Frederick of Prussia and the scandal of Flint Jack. Find out how a Greek monster created coral, moon rock explains the history of Earth's only satellite and obsidian inspired the world's favourite computer game. Stone by stone, story by fascinating story, Lapidarium builds into a dazzling, epoch-spanning adventure through human culture, and beyond.

'A delightful storybook . . . a portrait of our whole world created from the contents of the ground' Literary Review'A real cabinet of curiosities' Sunday TimesFrom the hematite used in cave paintings to the moldavite that became a TikTok sensation; from the stolen sandstone of Scone to the unexpected acoustics of Stonehenge; from crystal balls to compasses, rocks and minerals have always been central to our story.3,000 years ago Babylonians constructed lapidaries - books that tried to pin down the magical secrets of rocks. In The Secret Lives of Stones, renowned art critic Hettie Judah explores the unexpected stories behind sixty stones that have shaped and inspired human history, from Dorset fossil-hunters to Chinese philosophers, Catherine the Great to Michelangelo.Discover why alchemists sought cinnabar and sulphur. Unearth the mystery of the tuff statues of Rapa Nui, the lost amber room of Frederick of Prussia and the scandal of Flint Jack. Find out how a Greek monster created coral, moon rock explains the history of Earth's only satellite and obsidian inspired the world's favourite computer game. Stone by stone, story by fascinating story, The Secret Lives of Stones builds into a dazzling, epoch-spanning adventure through human culture, and beyond.

Step into the world of Frida Kahlo: behind the portraits and the surrealist art discover the fascinating woman who has transfixed the world.Fridamania has made Frida Kahlo's image ubiquitous: she has been reborn as a Halloween costume, Barbie doll, children's book character, textile print, phone cover and the inspiration for everything from cocktails to fashion shoots. But it is more difficult to get a clear vision of this bold and brilliant, foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking, hard-smoking, husband-stealing, occasionally bisexual, often bed-bound, wheelchair-using, needy, forthright and passionate woman. Hettie Judah sets out to correct that with this superb biography of one of the most charismatic artists of the last hundred years.Follow Frida's life through tumultuous love and life-altering accidents, towards recognition in the art world from the likes of André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, to becoming the first Mexican artist held at the Louvre. Judah delves into Kahlo's experiences and how these came together to inspire the art that has been described as an uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form. From an early battle with Polio, to a debilitating bus accident at 18, through love and heart ache, the life of Frida Kahlo was one of pain but a pain that bore great beauty.Hettie Judah is a contributing writer for publications including the Guardian, Vogue, The New York Times, Frieze and Art Quarterly.Lives of the Artists is a new series by Laurence King. Concise, highly readable biographies of some of the world's greatest artists written by authoritative and respected names from the world of art. Learn about the artist behind the masterpieces.Currently available: Andy Warhol and Artemisia Gentileschi

Prodigies, revolutionaries, defiers of the patriarchy; drunks, rebels and impassioned immigrants; queer pioneers, paint-spattered punks and proto-feminists: there have always been artists in London. Some were celebrated in their lifetime, others were out-of-step with the spirit of their age: too radical, too subversive, too modest, too female, too foreign. Art London is more than a guidebook. It will accompany you on a journey through this great city, telling stories, uncovering histories, sharing insights into those who have made, collected and influenced art past and present. Moving neighbourhood by neighbourhood, Art London travels the streets with you, revealing art in museums, galleries and beyond, from palace to pub to studio. Anish Kapoor, Grayson Perry, Mona Hatoum, John Akomfra, Rasheed Araeen, Sunil Gupta, Tracey Emin and Yinka Shonibare were among the artists who agreed to have their portraits taken for this book, while at work in their studios. Alex Schneiderman's exclusive photographs reveal the human element behind contemporary art, while pictures of streetside galleries place London's art scene within an ever-expanding cosmopolitan world. Fascinating, entertaining, full of anecdote and insights, Art London reflects the city itself: energetic, diverse, resilient, occasionally outrageous, and never short of fresh ideas. Also in the series:Vinyl London ISBN 9781788840156Rock 'n' Roll London ISBN 9781788840163London Peculiars ISBN 9781851499182

For too long, artists have been told that they can't have both motherhood and a successful career. In this polemical volume, critic and campaigner Hettie Judah argues that a paradigm shift is needed within the art world to take account of the needs of artist mothers (and other parents: artist fathers, parents who don't identify with the term 'mother', and parents in other sectors of the art world). Drawing on interviews with artists internationally, the book highlights some of the success stories that offer models for the future, from alternative support networks and residency models, to studio complexes with onsite childcare, and galleries with family-friendly policies. Some artists have described motherhood as providing them with renewed focus, a new direction in their work, and even inspiration for a complete change of career. Other artists chooseto keep their domestic and creative lives compartmentalised. All are placedat a disadvantage by the art world as it is currently structured. This book argues that by making changes and becoming more sensitive to the needs of artist parents, the art world has much to gain.

Tracey Emin (b.1963) is one of the most talked about artists in Britain today and arguably also one of the most controversial. Her diaristic works are explicit, unapologetic and raw, offering viewers unflinching explorations of how it is to live in a body and to experience passion, pain, and healing.This introduction offers a candid look into the life and work of Emin. It explores the events and relationships that influenced her art, including her formative years in Margate and the expressionist painters with whom she has identified across the generations. Bringing together a wide spectrum of her work, this book reveals an artist who confronts the subject of mortality – however wondrous, difficult or shameful – and ultimately celebrates the joy of living.

"Hallum's painting is charged with delight in colour, line, surface and composition, in powerfully unconventional ways." - Hettie Judah This is the first monograph on the London-born, Devon-based artist Jacqui Hallum. The publication documents Hallum's solo exhibition at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (10 October 2019 - 1 March 2020), along with a series of solo, two-person and group exhibitions held between 2014 and 2020. Hallum is best-known for her mixed-media paintings on textiles - techniques she has developed and refined over the course of twenty years since completing her studies. Incorporating imagery and visual languages ranging from medieval woodcuts and stained-glass windows to Art Nouveau children's illustrations, tarot cards and Berber rugs, Hallum employs ink staining, painting, drawing and printing to create layers of pattern, abstraction and passages of figurative imagery. As part of her working process, Hallum often leaves the fabrics in the open air, exposed to the elements, in order to introduce weathering into the works. History, religion, mysticism and the beliefs and creativity of past civilisations are among the themes that overlap - often in a literal sense of pieces of fabrics layered, pinned, draped and hung together - to form painterly palimpsests that carry a sense of the past with them into the present. Along with a foreword by Professor Caroline Wilkinson, Director of the School of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University, and an introductory essay by artist, curator and director of Kingsgate Workshops and Project Space in London, Dan Howard-Birt, the publication features newly commissioned essays by arts journalist and critic Hettie Judah and by Andrew Hunt, Professor of Fine Art and Curating at the University of Manchester. Also featured is the edited transcript of a conversation between Hallum and Howard-Birt held at The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Jacqui Hallum (b.1977, London) graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Coventry School of Art& Design, Coventry University, in 1999, and an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, in 2002. Hallum’s solo exhibition at The Walker Art Gallery followed a three-month fellowship at Liverpool John Moores University, which resulted from winning the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize in 2018.  The monograph, designed by work-form and edited by Susan Taylor, has been produced by Kingsgate Project Space and co-published with Anomie Publishing.

Lorna Robertson’s colourful paintings, often made with a combination of oil paint and collage, have a distinctly nostalgic tone. Shimmering female forms with swinging skirts from the 1950s or bonneted bathers from the 1920s jostle with richly described interiors and crowded tabletops. Hints and glimpses of tangible forms – a fashion model, for example, or a vase – appear and then fragment into patterns and explosions of colour.This new publication coincides with Robertson’s exhibition at Ingleby Gallery and is divided into sections that feature collections of recent large paintings by the artist (2015–2022), small paintings (all 2022) and works on paper (2016–2022), all of which demonstrate Robertson’s characteristic layered interpretations of the female form alongside recurring motifs such as hats, long dresses and flowers. Her drawings (2018–2020) offer fluid forms in ink, pencil and watercolour. An essay by art critic Hettie Judah explores Robertson’s work in terms of pattern, costume and architecture, drawing out key inspirations including tapestry, advertising and magazine design through abstracted forms. The influence of contemporary female painters and those from art history is further considered. In another text, Robertson is in conversation with artist and writer Mikey Cuddihy. This frank interview reveals much about Robertson’s intuitive working processes: from starting points, colour decisions, the rhythms of brushwork and considerations of scale, to the wider relationship between text, music, drawing and painting.The publication is edited by Ingleby Gallery, designed by Joanna Deans, Identity, printed by Albe De Coker, and co-published by Ingleby Edinburgh, and Anomie, London. The publication coincides with Robertson’s first solo exhibition 'thoughts, meals, days' at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2022. The artist is represented by Ingleby Gallery.Lorna Robertson was born in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland in 1967. She studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and currently lives and works in Glasgow. Recent public solo exhibitions include 'Kodachroma', Glasgow Project Room (2013); 'This Dark Ceiling', Intermedia Gallery, C.C.A, Glasgow (2008); 'The Overlooked', Atelier Am Eck, Dusseldorf, Germany (2006); and 'New Paintings', 64 Osborne Street, Glasgow (2005). Robertson’s group exhibitions include 'Once Upon a Time', Flora Fairbairn, The Portman Estate, London (2022); 'Faces in the Water', Ingleby at Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London (2021); 'Brexit: Mail Art from a Small Island', Sipgate Shows, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); 'Lorna Robertson and Robert MacBryde', Kingsgate Project Space, London (2019); 'Psychopathology of Everyday life', Glasgow Project Room (2011); and 'Vistas', Glasgow Project Room (2003). The artist was awarded the John Kinross Traveling Scholarship to Florence in 1990 and the Summer Scholarship, Hospitalfield School of Art, Arbroath, Scotland in 1989.

_Smickel Inn_ is a publication of works by London-based Anglo-Dutch artist Nick Goss, produced by Ingleby, Edinburgh, and co-published with Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, and Anomie Publishing, London. Along with around sixty plates and illustrations, the publication features an essay by writer, journalist and critic Hettie Judah, and an in-conversation between Goss, fellow painter Michael Armitage and writer Thomas Marks. ‘Smickel Inn is a real place in an unreal place,’ writes Judah, ‘a snack bar on an outer extremity of the port of Rotterdam.’ It’s a venue that is popular with port workers and sailors—a clientele of regular and transitory people often involved in sea freight or oil shipping, though their lives, personalities and stories are largely played out in Goss’s mixed-media paintings through the bar’s interior décor: an old vase with fresh flowers, a stack of glass ashtrays, a well-worn piano with a pile of books on top, an eclectic selection of picture frames with faded scenes and a clock that might only be right twice a day.Filtered through Goss’s imagination, Smickel Inn carries its history with it, much of it decorating the countertop; it’s a venue that charms with its informality—a place that knows itself, and its disparate customers. In real life, the bar has a cinematic view of the port and the North Sea, translated here, through Goss’s creative process of painting and silk-screening, into a scene from an engraving of seventeenth-century Sicily. Fragments from different places and eras infiltrate his images, creating a patina of palimpsests, visual echoes, perhaps, of memories of travellers coming through the port. The body of work takes us around the wider Dutch coastline and beyond—we see passengers on foot disembarking a ferry, have a backseat view of a car ride around the village of Stavenisse, and join a night-time campfire on the beach at Scheveningen, among other more mysterious, if not abstruse, locations and scenarios. Observation from contemporary life mingles with visual culture spanning centuries and continents in Goss’s oeuvre, creating lyrical yet strangely haunting and melancholic paintings, trapped in time somewhere between personal experience and collective memory.Nick Goss is an Anglo-Dutch painter, born in Bristol in 1981\. He studied first at the Slade School of Art (2002–06) and then at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2006–09). He has exhibited widely in Europe and America, including solo exhibitions with Josh Lilley, London, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, Simon Preston, New York, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. His first institutional survey, Morley’s Mirror, was presented in 2019 at Pallant House, Chichester, UK. _Smickel Inn_ is published to coincide with Goss’s first exhibition at Ingleby, Edinburgh, in the autumn of 2023.

Aubrey Levinthal’s paintings capture the quiet intensity of everyday life through translucent layers of oil paint, subtle gestures and atmospheric domestic scenes. Her work, often rooted in the personal – from family meals to moments of solitude – reflects themes of love, isolation, intimacy and self-reflection. Using thin washes of colour on wood panels, Levinthal explores the passage of time and interiority, often portraying herself and her loved ones in tender, introspective moments. Scenes like a woman gazing into a mirror, a mother and child in bed, or a solitary figure at lunch are imbued with emotion and psychological nuance. Influenced by artists from Giotto to Bonnard and Modersohn-Becker, Levinthal plays with perspective, scale and composition to explore perception and identity. Flowers, especially tulips and daffodils, often appear in her work as symbols of beauty and transience. Whether depicting sleep, reflection or the quiet spaces between people, Levinthal’s paintings invite us to consider the depth in small gestures and fleeting moments. Through a delicate balance of abstraction and realism, she evokes the complexity of inner life and the resonance of lived experience, portraying humans as simultaneously strong and vulnerable, grounded in routine yet rich with unspoken emotion.The publication Mirror Matter has been produced by Ingleby, Edinburgh, to accompany Levinthal’s first solo exhibition at the gallery in summer 2025. It features an essay by Jennifer Higgie and an interview with the artist by Hettie Judah. Designed by Jo Deans and printed by Albe De Coker, Antwerp, Mirror Matter is co-published by Ingleby, Edinburgh, and Anomie Publishing, London in an edition of 1500 copies. Aubrey Levinthal is a painter living and working in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. The city is important to her, she was born there in 1986, gained her BA from the Pennsylvania State University in 2008 and completed her MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2011. She has continued to make the city her home, and something of its light and colour has seeped into the muted, often melancholy tones of her palette. Her work has been shown extensively in the USA, most recently at the ICA, Boston, in A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, and at the Flag Foundation, New York. Following her 2023 ‘Instalment’, Mirror Matter is her first full solo exhibition at Ingleby.