Kylie Manning Charts New Depths in The Mudlarkers

Water has long served as the abiding muse for Kylie Manning’s luminous practice. From her formative years amongst the fishing communities of Alaska to her time navigating the coastlines of Mexico, the painter has remained perpetually attuned to the rhythms and revelations that aqueous environments offer. Now, with her forthcoming exhibition ‘The Mudlarkers’ at Pace London, Manning channels these accumulated experiences into a visionary new collection of paintings that speak to the profound ways in which landscape, memory and material culture converge.

The works draw their inspiration from multiple sources: the artist’s deeply personal relationship with coastal topography, combined with an acute sensitivity to the cultural and material specificities of London’s River Thames. In much the same way that mudlarkers of centuries past scoured the riverbed for forgotten treasures and fragments of history, Manning’s paintings excavate the emotional and textural depths of these environments, revealing beauty within the overlooked and discarded.

Manning’s trajectory has been nothing short of extraordinary. Her career has unfolded across remarkable terrain, from the working cabins of Alaskan fishing vessels to the grand stages of New York’s cultural institutions. Such peripatetic experience has enriched her visual vocabulary immeasurably, infusing her work with an authentic understanding of how place shapes identity, and how the natural world communicates through gesture and surface.

The paintings themselves evidence a masterful command of colour, form and composition. Manning works with a lyrical sensibility, her palette drawn from observation of water in its infinite manifestations: the grey green depths of northern seas, the luminous turquoise of warmer waters, the murky browns and silvers of the Thames. Each canvas becomes a meditation on the visible and invisible forces that shape our relationship to place.

Her engagement with material specificity places her firmly within a contemporary discourse that honours the particular over the generic. Rather than working from generalised notions of landscape, Manning grounds her practice in the granular details of specific locations: the geological formations of Alaskan shores, the colonial echoes embedded within Mexican coastal communities, and the layered histories sedimented within London’s great river.

‘The Mudlarkers’ represents a significant evolution in the artist’s practice, one that synthesises decades of observation, travel and creative inquiry into a body of work of remarkable poignancy and power. These paintings speak to the ways in which our deepest selves remain forever connected to the waters that shaped us, and to the enduring mystery of what lies beneath the surface.

Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).