‘MUDLARK’
New work
by Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings
13th - 23rd Oct 2010
Private View 12th October 6 - 9pm
The Charlie Dutton Gallery in association with the Fine Art Society are honoured to present 'Mudlark', new work by artists Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings.
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 unsanitary 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. A tangle of beams, shards and diamond shapes creates a quirky installation that makes us re-see the ordinary and the overlooked. Emma Biggs is an artist and mosaicist and writes about mosaic. Her blog www.mosaic-blog has an international readership. Matthew Collings is an artist, broadcaster and writer on art. He writes a monthly diary for the art magazine ‘Modern Painters’. He is currently making a series on Renaissance painting for the BBC
Matt arriving late with painting!
Press Release (word doc)
