Image: Pace Gallery, New York
Pace will present ‘The Mudlarkers,’ an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Kylie Manning, at its London gallery from October 13 through November 14.
The exhibition marks Manning’s first solo exhibition in London and continues her practice of creating site-specific paintings attuned to the histories and atmospheres of their destinations.
For the exhibition, Manning incorporates Hampshire and London clay, along with silt from the River Thames, into her pigments, drawing on the local tradition of mudlarking, which dates to the late eighteenth century.
Mudlarkers once scavenged the Thames banks at low tide for objects of value to sell; today, they seek historical artifacts preserved in the river’s mud, including Roman coins, pottery shards, tobacco pipes, and other centuries-old fragments.
That excavatory quality appears in areas of scraped and sanded paint and finds echoes in Manning’s childhood in Juneau, Alaska, where tides and coastal terrain shaped how she read the landscape while waiting for low water to reveal her father’s geoduck farm and digging for clams in summer.
Manning begins the paintings with underpaintings of directly observed figure studies, then layers atmospheric terrains of paint over them, leaving only traces of shoulders, limbs, and faces.
Carrying a kind of grief and acknowledging loss as a site of transformation, the paintings speak to Marcel Duchamp’s term ‘infrathin,’ which describes the brief window of time in which an absence manifests in a physical presence.
The excavation involves returning to a site, searching and erasing through its sediment, and waiting for something to disclose itself, with no certainty that anything will answer.
