MUDLARKING
A SERIES OF PROJECTS CENTRED EXPLORING THE MUDLARKING COMMUNITY .
2021
A series of projects investigating the hobby of Mudlarking: an activity which takes place on the banks of the river Thames in London.
This includes a short film and an interactive website both completed in the first year of my degree. I then built upon this research to create a piece for the student radio station further exploring the topic.
'MUDLARKING IN A NEW WAVE OF POPULARITY'
(Five-week project, first year of university )
‘Mudlarking in a New Wave of Popularity’ centers on those who Mudlark along the foreshore of the tidal river Thames. The online Mudlarking community is vast with Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members and Mudlark Instagram accounts gaining followings of up to 80 thousand. Initially, I set out to investigate connectivity within these Mudalrk networks; exploring how a predominantly solitary activity could have such an abundant social community.
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My investigations online and interviewing 7 Mudlarks of different ages and genders lead me to produce a film on the rising popularity of the hobby and the emerging anxieties and hierarchies within the community which have accompanied this.
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The film was made over a four-week period, in the midst of a covid lockdown thus all the interviews featured in the film took place over the phone and via zoom call. The film uses a combination of my own footage, archive material, and desktop documentary, adapting to the conditions I was working in which limited my access to other people.
'MUDLARK IMAGINARIES'
WEBSITE MADE IN 2021 FEATURED A RANGE OF MULTIMEDIA PIECES
A website made as part of multi-modal module in Year 1 of my degree which features, text, audio and visual/illustrative work.
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Whilst conducting interviews and research for the documentary featured above, I saw re-iterated again and again that the activity of Mudlarking was as much about imagination as it was about history. Each object found can prompt ideas and visions of past lives; who had previously owned the object? how was it used? why had it come to reside on the banks of the river?
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Mudlark Imaginaries aims to explore and communicate the experiences which may unfold upon finding an object on the Thames foreshore. The site is structured around the objects themselves: clicking on their images will open up a small window into the imagination and stories that may accompany them. The pages not only communicate individual imaginations but the contrasts and intersections of multiple imaginations which can be observed on social media platforms, as fanatics debate over the true origins over different objects. The information presented on the page was gathered from the facebook group 'Thames Foreshore Finds' and through phone call interviews with different Mudlarks.
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