Kylie Manning: The Mudlarkers

Mudlarker (n.) — a person who scavenges in the wet mud of a river, particularly along the River Thames in London, in search of valuable or historic objects.

Kylie Manning’s light-filled studio and light-filled personality are a bit deceptive. As you enter the room, all that brightness sets you up for a journey into a world filled with beauty and joy.

She places chairs near the south-facing window, hauling out towering canvases filled with watery swaths of color. And then the darkness, cradled in fields of rust and deep green, begins to seep through, and your experience starts to change.

Manning’s practice stems from two seemingly contradictory sources.

The first is the figure. After years of painting from models, Manning has developed a distinctive kind of figuration in which images emerge through transparent layers of wash. For the past decade, her figures have existed at varying levels of “completion”: faces and hands may be articulated in exquisite detail while torsos and legs appear only to disappear again into the surrounding landscape. These melting body parts are the power source of Manning’s paintings, even when they are entirely gone. 

The second point of departure is the color field. The skeins and washes that make up these paintings have always seemed to recall the fierce atmosphere of the artist’s native Alaska: turbulent seas, dramatic valleys, weather overtaking land. 

Diagonally stacked fields of color become Manning’s primary building blocks. Grand sweeps of luminous, thin pigment arrange themselves like geologic layers or sedimentation, interrupted by occasional drawings—some determinedly pictorial, some almost like doodles—breaking the edges of the underpinning planes.

The result is a roiling, Turner-esque texture. The texture of a storm, of a crashing sea or convulsing landscape. Billowing blooms are positioned in counterpoint to gritty, cross-hatched fields, like sky against earth, or earth against air. These fields assemble in the eye as tenuous, slippery depictions of reality. You strain to see the landscape through a sandstorm, or to make out distant formations through furious waves and spray.

This familiarity with wind and weather cannot be faked. In fact, Manning spent years in Alaska as a mariner and commercial salmon fisherman. Only time spent negotiating with the realities of the Bering Sea can yield this sort of intimacy and understanding of the unpredictable power of water and wind.

And so, Manning deploys figuration and atmospheric abstraction together to great effect. But the real tension in these works is not that oft-repeated, largely fictional opposition. The question is not whether the painting depicts or emotes, represents or exists. Here in the early twenty-first century, the question is about the artist and the work, the two now functioning as figure and ground, constantly transforming in and out of each other.

In fact, Manning wades into an even more difficult dichotomy: between the human being’s place in the picture and the construction of a sublime composition of color and light.

The figures scaffold the picture in much the same way physical scaffolding supports a building: necessary to its making and then strangely superfluous once the structure can stand by itself. Their disappearance does not mean that they cease to exist. Something of them remains embedded in the painting.

And it is precisely this sensation—abstraction barely resolving, or perhaps just beginning to resolve—that gives the paintings their peculiar psychological charge. The eye strains to see. That strain produces unease, but it also produces an energized state of being. The sensation of being caught in the storm makes everything brighter and more intense, even as the world refuses to resolve into crisp detail.

When faces or bodies do emerge from the mist, they can actually quiet the mind. They become resting places for the eye. In Manning’s unstable worlds, such resting places are scarce. In some paintings, they are nonexistent.

The monumental Eyes only, the magnum opus of this exhibition, spans three canvases and roughly six meters.

Across the top of the work, a vague horizon line separates a pale pink sky from the emerald fields occupying most of the composition. Along that horizon, Manning offers a subtle echo of Rembrandt’s winter landscapes. Controlled strokes from a stiff brush leave small, box-like forms scattered in the distance, recalling the economical pen strokes by which Rembrandt could transform a handful of marks into fence posts, buildings, or other signs of human habitation.

Manning’s marks perform a similar function. They signal architecture, establishing depth and space. Below them, however, landscape becomes furious seascape. Mountainous green swells occupy the bulk of the canvas. The composition pitches and rolls.

The physical materials of Eyes only reinforce this instability. Oil is joined by charcoal, graphite, Hampshire chalk, London clay, quartz, pyrite, calcium carbonate, and iron oxides. These substances do more than describe landscape; they endow the painting with something like its physical memory. The picture does not simply depict a place; traces of place enter into its substance.

In Cloven rock, Manning invokes Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” particularly its image of oak split clean under an axe:

Good block of oak it was I split
As large around as the chopping block
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless
Like a cloven rock

She destabilizes the composition in green and blue with a field of violent, impacted drawing on the left and a transparent band extending toward the right, almost as though it has been ejected from the furious earthen mass beside it. Seen in person, this pale green veil has a physical presence that a photograph does not convey. It seems to hold down a sea of secrets effortlessly.

This was the location of a figure that Manning entirely erased.

That erasure is crucial. For all the painting’s action and spontaneity, Cloven rock has the physical conviction of something geological—a solid mass breaking open under tectonic pressure. The absent figure becomes another buried stratum. We cannot see it, but its former presence has helped determine everything that remains.

The Frost reference becomes particularly apt here. Manning’s painting repeatedly hovers between solidity and dissolution: earth behaves like water, water acquires the weight of rock, and the body becomes atmosphere. The painting itself seems cloven—split open not simply to reveal what lies underneath, but to make visible the forces that have acted upon it.

The results are luminous and mysterious, full of love and pain. Looking at these paintings can feel like traversing a wire bridge where the next handhold remains just beyond reach until you release the one you are desperately clinging to.

It is in that moment—exposed, insecure, suspended between one certainty and the next—that the meaning of the paintings begins to emerge.

In this ruddy composition, amid liquid, stormy skies and frozen, tortured landscapes, Manning finds room for third sort of refrain: a scraped wall of shattered forms. These paintings take on an aspect more reminiscent of Clyfford Still than Turner. Like hides drying on a rack or pigments staining the walls of a cave, these flattened renditions act like records frozen in time—the thin, fossilized remains of an image that has been overpainted for generations. 

“Puestero” refers to the lonely ranch hands of the Patagonian outback, caring for and watching over that which he will never own. The puestero’s solitary fidelity to duty seems to be engraved on the painting’s surface. But that engraving feels almost entirely washed away, as if by years of weather, rather than the artist’s brush and turpentine. 

These paintings add a kind of redolent coda to the end of the triumphant, energetic symphonies that are Manning’s exhibitions. They take on the form of movements in a symphony or tracks on an album, balancing one another while expressing the range the artist sees in her thesis.

Which brings us back to the mudlarkers.

Though they appear in many 19th-century, Dickensian engravings, mudlarkers continue to haunt the banks of the Thames to this very day. In high boots and gloves, contemporary mudlarkers search the muck and pebble shores of that ancient waterway, not merely for a dropped ring or a lost tenner but for fragments of history: a coin, a clay pipe, some tiny object released from centuries of accumulated mud.

The possibility of those unseen and long-buried treasures keeps the mudlarkers searching. And I suspect that if you asked them, they might say that the gravelly gray banks of the Thames shine with a kind of beauty that a non-seeker cannot quite appreciate.

So it is with Manning’s paintings. She is singing the songs of the mudlarker; from odes to the tireless searcher to grand anthems of the ancient landscape, she finds the themes and variations of our history. Soaked with the glory and wretchedness of our mortality, in all its grimy beauty, Manning unearths our depth of feeling. She labors not just to find beauty but to bring it up from the ground, still attached to its humble matrix. 

These paintings are for believers, not doubters. Their beauty is fully revealed when you choose to have faith that what we are—what makes us human—is buried in a field that can be excavated. Those fields shine and flash with the beauty of a body, a landscape, a memory—with the history of the painting’s own making. 

And so, along with the artist, the viewer becomes a kind of mudlarker, searching the accumulated sediment of Manning’s marks for something startling and stunning. And in the searching—and the occasional finding—the magic of these paintings shines through.