Tom Kaniok: Mud Makes the Revivalists

Mud Makes The Revivalists explores ecology, climate change, animism (the belief that all things have a spiritual consciousness), memory, and belonging to nature—positioning the landscape as having a sense of agency, and bewitching us into acts of repair. Through drawing and painting, it investigates the nature we are drawn to, and why.

Tom has visited and researched Kingsbridge through walking, writing, drawing, and painting. Drawing on his upbringing in a rural context on the Fal River and now based on the Lizard in Cornwall, Kaniok brings lived experience of working landscapes into dialogue with the setting of Kingsbridge, tracing parallels between past and present, memory and observation. This sustained engagement underpins an exhibition that weaves together artistic responses to possible past, present, and future relationships between people and place.

Kingsbridge Bus Station is a recurring motif: a point of departure that functions as both an access to nature and a gateway from the real, into the imagined.

The estuary’s riverbed will serve as symbolic material: shaped by time and entangled life, holding both decay and renewal. It reflects cycles of transference (seaweed feeding apple trees, fallen leaves returning to the muddy creeks) and the poetic strangeness of species such as the Fan Mussel.

Mud Makes The Revivalists is a poetic, place-based inquiry into how nature, community, and perception shape our evolving relationship with landscape, and re-enchantment might emerge as a form of ecological care.

Mud Makes The Revivalists explores ecology, climate change, animism (the belief that all things have a spiritual consciousness), memory, and belonging to nature—positioning the landscape as having a sense of agency, and bewitching us into acts of repair. Through drawing and painting, it investigates the nature we are drawn to, and why.

Tom has visited and researched Kingsbridge through walking, writing, drawing, and painting. Drawing on his upbringing in a rural context on the Fal River and now based on the Lizard in Cornwall, Kaniok brings lived experience of working landscapes into dialogue with the setting of Kingsbridge, tracing parallels between past and present, memory and observation. This sustained engagement underpins an exhibition that weaves together artistic responses to possible past, present, and future relationships between people and place.

Kingsbridge Bus Station is a recurring motif: a point of departure that functions as both an access to nature and a gateway from the real, into the imagined.

The estuary’s riverbed will serve as symbolic material: shaped by time and entangled life, holding both decay and renewal. It reflects cycles of transference (seaweed feeding apple trees, fallen leaves returning to the muddy creeks) and the poetic strangeness of species such as the Fan Mussel.

Mud Makes The Revivalists is a poetic, place-based inquiry into how nature, community, and perception shape our evolving relationship with landscape, and re-enchantment might emerge as a form of ecological care.