Lucy Mudel, The Tub Hackney

Please introduce yourself, your practice, and your work with The Tub.

Thank you kindly for taking the time to enquire about my work. My name is Lucy Mudel, I am a curator, creative events manager, and multidisciplinary American artist in the United Kingdom. I am working in different positions related to arts and culture in London, while also in my own time expanding my fine arts practice since 2016. I have a Masters of Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus on image making in various fields including photography, still, and moving image. My personal arts practice currently focuses on combining fine art with animation, painting, and photography. My work at The Tub involved curation, exhibition installation/deinstall and gallery space management. I worked in a gallery management team with the cofounders: Eddie Howard, Freya Moffat, and Georgia Fraser. I joined a year after the space opened. I am very passionate about curation and hosting of arts and culture events, especially those for contemporary or emerging artists. In speaking with the co-founders, I very much strived to host as many exhibitions that seemed feasible while balancing the need for studio time. I also acted as both a solo curator and co- curator, hosting 8 exhibitions from the summer of 2021: “Anywhere in Between", “Cool, Sweet, Fresh Waters", “Supple Octopus”, “Salon des Refusés”, “Mendes and his Mentors”, “I Felt That”, “Synthesis”and a “Print Fair”. As The Tub is an artist collective combined with a gallery space, I was working in space management and administration. Some of my tasks included helping host gallery events such as life drawing classes, exhibiting various group shows, event set up and take down, art pricing, online event promotion through our website and social media, managing technical equipment, installation and handling works. I immensely appreciate having joined the team at The Tub and deeply appreciate all of the artists I was fortunate to work with. We hosted a range of shows, from the solo exhibitions to large group shows up to 30 artists, from artists at various stages in their career, both UK and international artists, while also offered an affordable gallery space for students from universities such as Slade, City and Guilds, and The Royal Drawing School.

What has been your favourite curatorial experience at The Tub?

My favourite curatorial experience at The Tub was the show "Anywhere in Between". This experience holds a special place for me as it was a body of work featuring altered, morphed, and distorted perceptions across many different mediums. The show "Anywhere in Between" was a year long effort co-curated by myself (Lucy Mudel) and Bella Aleksandrova, in coordination with the three co-founders of The Tub. My aim with "Anywhere in Between" was to exhibit a body of work related to the themes of altered, morphed and distorted. In my own work, I am especially interested in exploring surrealism, consciousness, distortions, and organic bodies. The show combined fine art paintings, prints, sculpture, illustration, video and animation. It was very time consuming to plan, especially given that there was no funding for the time required to coordinate all of the artists, however this made the final outcome and hearing such positive feedback on the experience of the show feel even more rewarding to see it come together in both a physical and digital sense. This emerged into the basis of the theme of the exhibition, allowing a vast interpretation of the open call prompt. Given the hundreds of responses we received from artists in the UK and abroad, we were then able to curate the show down to it's final result. I wanted to create a show which had movement throughout the gallery space in terms of how the various work connected, while also considering the varied narratives a viewing audience could create as they navigate between different artists and forms. In order to make the show further accessible to those who could not attend the physical space, I also created the webpages on The Tub website where the works can still be seen. With a show of this scale in such a small gallery space, finding potential narrative or aesthetic connections between the works was crucial so the visual appearance of the show reflected the curation that went into it. I found the planning and curation of each piece in terms of how to connect and layout the works in the space with a focus on how it would interpret the audience's experience of the show to be very rewarding. The space had a flow between light and dark, as well as growth and decay. The physical show had a narrative which could be felt despite such variety of work and I feel it was a very successful group exhibition.

How does your personal practice inform your curatorial taste?

In my personal arts practice, I tend to shift between mediums to explore my understanding of new forms and also to ensure the subject which I am creating is presented in the format which seems most fitting. I find myself less interested in topics of the mundane or political agitations, rather I tend to gravitate towards mental states, magic realism, the interconnection between nature, as well as non-human and human attributes. While I would not exclude a topic or piece that lies outside of my own practice and research interests, I tend to gravitate towards work which is more organic in form, has a greater sense of whimsy, work which considers the interrelation between objects and living beings, concepts of altered perception or behavioral patterns. As I shifted into the arts from a predisposition of a low income background with no connections or formal education in fine art until adulthood, I find with my curatorial taste I am very supportive of emerging artists or those who have come from a non-traditional background in further expanding accessibility to arts spaces. I feel that work which questions different perceptions or states of being draw my interest most.

What's next for you?

My professional aim is to continue to work in the UK arts industry. While also continuing my work with The Tub, I am working on organising and curating further exhibitions in my own time. Regarding my immediate goals, I would like to begin working with additional arts and culture organisations in both the UK and abroad. I hope to expand my work and illuminate the topics which I feel are both prevalent to invoke audience dialogue, as well as those which I feel most passionate about. I hope to further expand my curation work to including more sound, sculpture, and immersive installation pieces as well. As for my personal practice, I am in a development stage of refining my ideas and begin making a more coherent body of work which can be exhibited in the next year to five years. However for this coming year 2023, I am aiming to personally curate at least one show in London while starting to work with additional arts organisations.