Mudlarking in London with Kylie Manning

In this film, New York-based artist Kylie Manning explores the banks of the River Thames and discusses her new paintings on view in The Mudlarkers at Pace in London. The Mudlarkers represents a continuation of Manning’s ongoing practice of creating site-specific paintings attuned to the unique histories and atmospheres of their destinations.

Here, she 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. Scavenging the banks of the Thames at low tide, mudlarkers once searched for objects of value to sell; today, they seek the historical artifacts—Roman coins, pottery shards, tobacco pipes, and other centuries-old fragments—that the river’s mud has preserved.

“This notion of mudlarking shares a peculiar search with painting: a faith in the nearly visible, in something of value just beneath the surface,” Manning says. “You return to a site with a kind of devotion, searching and erasing through its sediment, waiting for something to disclose itself. It is an excavation made partly in the dark—digging through a mental geology with no certainty that anything will answer you.”