- Venue
- Generation & Display
- Starts
- Wednesday, June 15, 2022
- Ends
- Sunday, July 3, 2022
- Address
- Queensrollahouse 18 Trading Estate Road London NW10 7LU www.generationanddisplay.com
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Bailey & Katrin Hanusch
Mudlark
Curated by Bailey & Katrin Hanusch
Artists: Bailey, Leo Carlton, Katrin Hanusch, Adam Leach, Hongxi Li, Nuka Nayu
Private view 15th June 6:30—9pm
Exhibition 16th June — 3rd July 2022
By appointment [email protected]
Generation and Display is excited to announce the opening of Mudlark, an exhibition curated by Bailey and Katrin Hanusch. Mudlark brings together sculpture, drawing, installation, jewellery, and design that investigate the post-human body via the artist’s experience of manoeuvring within an increasingly complex world. In their practices, the artists follow different imperatives while sharing a common sense of care and concern for us now and those to come. Mediums are both considered and inclusive to whatever might be to hand and lend itself to the artistic process.
A prioritised material awareness finds kinship with that of ‘mudlarks’ — street children who survived by scavenging and trading what valuables they could find on the banks of the River Thames during the 19th century. To get to the river banks and forage there was not without risk; it implied descending over slippery steps and slopes at low tide to comb through junk, bones, and broken crockery. If lucky, the mudlarks found something useful in the detritus of past centuries that would see them through before the next necessary excursion.
The artists in this show apply themselves likewise, descending into the mud and silt of collective experience to extract fresh aspects and potentialities; they employ metaphor that transcends or evades the literal; they use images that communicate the experience of estrangement; they develop tools and methods to adapt to the environment; they employ symbols that fend and protect, and derive an essence from the mud that might just be an elixir.
Mudlark was likely slang for a hog, or a humorous contrasting with the skylark. To lark is also to indulge in playful activity. Past generations have created the conditions of the here and now, and their earlier actions have set into motion consequences we have inherited today. Within this, the artist’s imagination is an alchemical faculty that melds fragments, gleans function and value, deciphers signs and pattern, reads tracks and traces. Here, they dig out from between the archaeologist and the conjuror; a miracle aligner in an ever-changing environment.
At the banks of the Thames, low tide reveals while high tide reconfigures — a dynamic as revelatory as it may be disquieting.
