Mudlark

Curated by Bailey & Katrin Hanusch
Exhibition 16th June — 3rd July 2022


Featuring works by artist Adam Leach, Leo Carlton, Bailey, Hongxi Li, and Katrin Hanusch


Mudlark brings together a variety of works – ranging from jewellery to installation – that investigate the post-human body via the artist’s experience of manoeuvring within an increasingly complex world. Materials are inclusive to whatever might be to hand and lend itself to the artistic process.

In the artists’ practices a prioritised material awareness finds kinship with that of ‘mudlarks’ — street children who survived by scavenging and trading valuables they could find on the banks of the River Thames, during the 19th century. Getting to the river banks to forage was not without risk; it implied descending over slippery steps and slopes at low tide to comb through junk, bones and broken crockery.

The artists 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. 

At the banks of the Thames, low tide reveals while high tide reconfigures — a dynamic as revelatory as it may be disquieting.


Generation & Display
Queensrollahouse
18 Trading Estate Road
London NW10 7LU