MUD PLAY

Exhibition Essay by Mona Filip

Nicolas Fleming: More of a Mud Room
Patel Brown Gallery, 2023



Mudrooms are transitional spaces between the outside world and home where one discards the traces of outdoors before entering domestic privacy. They are meant to hold the muddy dirt we drag inside, preventing it from invading our living quarters. In Nicolas Fleming’s mudroom, however, the mud engulfs and traps the household. Fleming created A Mudroomat the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre in 2022 as a site-specific installation that was part of Fugitive Rituals, a series of projects curated by Myung-Sun Kim. Transforming the former space of the gallery gift shop, he built a small apartment out of ordinary construction materials, furnished with commonplace fixtures, appliances and objects. The look and feel was familiar – a semblance of the everyday – except that everything was encased in mud. Not the wet-soil-on-a-rainy-day kind of mud, but the joint compound routinely used for drywall finishing.

Made from ground gypsum, drywall mud serves both a structural and an aesthetic purpose, providing physical support and smoothing walls for a clean, continuous appearance. When pigmented with colourful chalk powder, it marks areas for repair. A similar form of gypsum can be used in plaster casting to produce moulds for artistic purposes. Fleming extends the use of these contractor-grade materials, just as he extends the life of household objects otherwise headed for recycling or landfill. Going against their traditional functionality, he pushes their inherent formal capabilities to new creative ends. In this process, he captures daily life – its intimate accumulations of things and gestures – in an arrested instant, perpetually fixed. Caught in cheerfully tinted mud, the objects that make up the living space are all still there – perhaps even more so as they have been entombed in place – yet at the same time they are not. They have become their own embodied, poignant absences.

Swathed in mud, things shed their distinctiveness, making evident their connectedness – an invisible skin enveloping the living space where life unfolds. In this suspension of reality, Fleming opens up an array of opportunities – for reflection, emotion, action, play. He creates a generous playground where guests are invited to experiment. The setting of domestic relationality becomes the stage of artistic interventions that build on and expand Fleming’s initial intentions, mediating further relations with reality. Successively invited to contribute individual responses in A Mudroom, artists Patrick Cruz, Shellie Zhang, Élise Provencher, Ingrid Syage Tremblay, Celia Perrin Sidarous, GHY Cheung, Nicolas Grenier and The Mud Painters youth workshop take up the challenge with the same liberating spirit in which it is offered. They incorporate new objects that contrast the ghostly presence of their mudded counterparts, present inspired narrative threads, and evoke art historical counterpoints to the given aesthetic premise.

Displaying the residues of the Agnes installation documented in a series of prints and a selection of original mud sculptures, More of A Mudroom revisits the evidence of artistic exchange through process and collaboration. Metaphorically inviting us to play in the mud, Fleming unlocks endless possibilities for engagement; playing is the process through which humans learn to relate to the world and comprehend reality. Because we are relational beings, we see a world of relations around us. Or, more likely, it is from the world, and sometimes through art, that we understand how to be in relation.