MUDLARK
New work by Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings

13^th – 23^rd October 2010
Private View 12^th October 6 -9pm

A mudlark is someone who collects objects from the Thames. Two centuries ago desperation forced society’s most impoverished – mostly women and children — to make a living this way. It was a dangerous and an insanitary way of life – sewers emptied directly into the river, and both human and animal corpses were frequently found on the foreshore.

Biggs and Collings continue a theme addressed in their work – their belief that the realm of art experience often referred to using terms like ‘abstraction’, ‘form’ or ‘aesthetics’ never develops in a void, but always relates directly to economics, work and community. That is, a sense of beauty expresses society’s changing understanding of reality. Nineteenth century engineers used industrial waste – broken ceramic, brick and glass — to shore up the banks of the Thames. Biggs and Collings have used these found objects – rich in social history – and transformed them. When art heightens the visual nature of an object it seduces you into re-seeing it, and then you automatically start re-thinking it.  Think of history as a set of objects. We don’t know what lies beneath our feet.  History is all about forgetting and re-finding.  Mudlark is about changing reality.  These works help us re-see the ordinary and the overlooked.