The entrance to the Mudroom gallery is a front porch.
Not a lobby. Not a foyer. A front porch on Charlotte Street in downtown Fredericton, attached to the home of Sienna Ingham and Seger Dow.
To walk in is to cross a threshold that feels, as Ingham puts it, like crashing someone’s house. That’s the point.
“It’s not waiting for other people to do things,” said Ingham, a textile artist. “It’s about using what you have and not limiting yourself.”
Now in its second year, the Mudroom is hosting Buck — a group exhibition named after the July moon and featuring five Maritime artists working across painting, sculpture, textile and film.
It’s been running weekends this July.
Sienna Ingham says the Mudroom has no funding, and artists are paid through donation, but she believes artists should not have to wait for permission to show their work. (Jennifer William/CBC)
Ingham started the Mudroom because she believed something was missing.
Not that Fredericton lacks arts spaces — the city has established institutions and commercial galleries that have served the arts community for decades.
But those spaces, she said, tend to favour artists with long resumés and established careers. Some of the most interesting and challenging work, she said, happens somewhere else.
“The real work in subcultural and art settings — a lot of that happens in DIY spaces,” she said. “You need both to have a healthy art scene.”
The Mudroom costs nothing to attend. Artists are paid through donations.
WATCH | ‘You don’t need permission for it,’ artist says:
When there’s no space for your art, make your own: Inside Fredericton’s Mudroom Gallery
A front porch on Charlotte Street has become a home for local artists.
There is no application process. Ingham hand picks the artists based not on prestige but on commitment to their practice.
“It’s not necessarily about the work you’re making,” she said. “It’s about your consistency and devotion to making things.”
Ally Keane, a textile and visual artist who works with Craft New Brunswick, said the arts community already searches for the early works of celebrated artists — paintings made in their 20s that were never shown and spent decades hidden away.
The Mudroom, she said, is a chance to see that work while it is still happening.
“It’s even more exciting to see someone who is 25 and you see maybe their first show and then you follow their career forever,” Keane said. “Let’s make a place for first works to find a really good home.”
Buck features five Maritime artists working across painting, sculpture, textile and film. (Jennifer William/CBC)
The walls of the Mudroom porch are hung with paintings and sculpture. A found piece of wood drilled into the floor holds an old Apple monitor playing a short film on a continuous loop. A bar with flowers and exhibition catalogues sits at the back.
It does not look like a gallery, and that is also the point.
Ry O’Toole is showing a short film in Buck called Poultice 0. It follows two fraternal twins who accidentally enter a code into a stone and get caught in a series of time loops.
It is not the kind of work that finds its way easily into traditional gallery spaces. O’Toole said this is part of why a space like the Mudroom matters.
“Audiences in DIY spaces are much more open-minded,” he said. “In traditional spaces, people have come to expect a certain level of familiarity with work. Here people approach it with a much more open mind.”
The opening night was packed, and people stayed and talked and asked questions about the work. For O’Toole that was the proof.
“There’s a real investment when you go see a show at a DIY space like Mudroom,” he said. “You’re speaking to somebody — not just a few people who are passingly interested.”
Benjamin Elder-Gomes’s Adoration of the Marshi uses collaged maps and layered materials to explore colonization and Indigenous identity. (Jennifer William/CBC)
Jay Isaac knows what it looks like when a community does not have enough space for its artists.
The Saint John-based multidisciplinary artist converted a dilapidated barn outside St. Martins into a contemporary art gallery called 13 Cedars.
He and his partner renovated it over a year and a half — turning a rural fixer-upper into an exhibition space for emerging artists in New Brunswick. It ran until they sold the property in April.
Isaac said that when he moved back to New Brunswick after years in Toronto, the gap was clear. Contemporary art infrastructure simply does not exist in New Brunswick the way it does in larger cities. The solution, he said, is not to wait for institutions to fix it.
“This form of autonomous organizing is in my mind the solution,” Isaac said. “If you have work that you want to show — organize something and show it.
“t’s really as simple as that. If it’s in a laundromat, if it’s in a bar, if it’s in a mudroom — this is really the answer. You don’t need permission for it.”
Woodstock-based artist Alex Curtis shows his works in Buck exploring humour, beauty and meaning in rural Atlantic Canadian life. (Jennifer William/CBC)
Daniel Rumboldt has watched this happen across the country.
As president of CARFAC. the national organization representing Canadian artists, he said investment in the arts has not kept pace with the number of artists making work.
“And because of that artists are finding alternative spaces,” he said.
Spaces like the Mudroom are both a solution and a signal — proof that communities want this and that artists will build it themselves if they have to.
“Emerging artists are the future,” Rumboldt said. “The future of what the arts look like. The future of our culture and our tradition.”
Maina’s mixed media piece is among the works on display in the Buck exhibition. (Jennifer William/CBC)
Ingham is not interested in growth for its own sake and has no plans to move to a bigger space or scale up into something more institutional.
“We cannot keep looking in the same places for change,” she said. “If you can find something in your heart that drives you to just keep doing it. Please do.”
This is the last weekend for Buck, which runs Friday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from noon to 2 p.m. at 220 Charlotte St. in Fredericton.