Mud Immaculate is a still life project that appropriates the art historical context of still life arrangements to reframe sites of human neglect as quiet sources of vitality. These still life arrangements are made of items- flora, fauna, water, mud, human detritus- collected from roadside drainage ditches and polluted wetlands. The assemblages sit against backdrops of "ditch-dyed" textiles- the cloths were left in the wet earth from whence the objects came, then retrieved after several weeks. The images are matted with the ditch-dyed cloths. These boundary-places on the fringe of urban life and their refuse urge us to look with a more nuanced eye at the environments in which we create, inhabit, and inherit. Mud Immaculate reveals the unexpected biodiversity and liminal beauty of such sites and poses the question: what can we salvage from this wreckage?
