Lindsey Mendick is known primarily for her highly detailed sculptural ceramics – “protagonists” as she describes them – that take the stage within large-scale, multi-space installations that also include stained glass, film, furniture and performance.
Her autobiographical work, which has explored subjects including the public shaming of women, polycystic ovary syndrome, and binge drinking, “offers a form of catharsis, encouraging the viewer to explore their own personal history through the revisionist lens of the artist.”
Her solo and group exhibitions include Sh*tfaced at Jupiter Artland, Where the Bodies are Buried at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Strange Clay at Hayward Gallery, and Off With Her Head at Carl Freedman Gallery. Mendick received the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020, the Alexandra Reinhardt memorial award in 2018 and was also selected for Jerwood Survey in 2019 and the Future Generations Art Prize in 2020.
She studied at Sheffield Hallam University then the Royal College of Art, London, and now lives and works in Margate. There, with her partner, the artist Guy Oliver, Mendick initiated Quench Gallery to provide vital support for early career artists through exhibitions and mentoring.
EW: Margate seems like a really supportive scene that you’re an integral part of. How has living and working there affected your practice?
LM: I’ve always been really attracted to those groups of people that move out of London and start communities. Someone said to me that Margate is for everyone who enjoyed London and then think, ‘No, I can’t hack it that much!’ It’s for the sensitive souls.
My studio and Quench are at the end of my road. Things are so close you can pop in everywhere. You can be a good friend, and can cultivate really good relationships. Everyone I work with is within about half of mile. If I think, oh, I need to work with someone who makes stained glass, then there’s someone just down the road who is doing that, or someone who does upholstery, or who’s a set designer or producer. Margate has such a rich tapestry of people that support each other, who want to bring each other up and enjoy collaborating, so my practice exploded when I got here.
Carl Freedman Gallery, which made the move from London to Margate in 2019, represents you. How did that relationship come about?
Before I moved here, Russell Tovey was doing a show in Margate, and he’d seen my work and invited me to be in it, so I had that relationship. Then, on Christmas Eve, Rob [Robert Diament, Director of Carl Freedman Gallery] invited me for a little walk, just us two, and I said ‘Well I don’t like walking and where are we going?’ and he said, ‘We’d really like to represent you.’
There’s something wonderful about the people you need being so close. I’m a very needy artist. I like communication. I’m not good at being left to my own devices. I struggle with my mental health and that kind of close-knit community of people who are ready to pick you up is really important to me.
In the Royal College I met my very closest friend, Paloma Proudfoot [with whom Mendick collaborates under the moniker Proudick]. We got through those first years of being out of art college by leaning on each other. Ringing each other all day every day. ‘Should I do this? What temperature should the kiln be on?’ We still ring each other at the drop of a hat, to talk about the intricacies of both of our practices.
You’ve described your exhibitions as ephemeral. How does that idea sit alongside ceramics being so process-based and laborious to make?
There’s a difference between the work and the exhibition. I think of my shows like stage sets. As an artist you have so many tools and it’s your choice which ones to use. In my work the ceramics or other pieces are often the protagonists. And they’re given context by the surroundings. Often, thematically, there’ll be something I’m itching to talk about and it spirals out into a body of work.
So the work is made but it has to exist within a framework. Often I’m creating surreal and multi-layered sculptures and I think that I really want them to make their point known. In order to do that I need the setting to be complementary or juxtaposing.
With Off With Her Head [at Carl Freedman Gallery, 2022], the idea was always to make a London Dungeon-style experience, because there was nothing more fucked up than having this incredibly joyous experience that’s centred on the vilification of women!
I remember going there aged about five, and the main attraction was the Jack the Ripper Experience. I think we’re able to enjoy and laugh at the macabre in history because we think, ‘Haven’t we moved on? Aren’t things different now?’ And then you realise things haven’t changed that much.
So in Off With Her Head I wanted you to experience the show in the same way that you would these attractions. And for there to be that sort of mocking humour. But the protagonists were different to the ones that you normally see [including Britney Spears, Medusa, Princess Diana, Marsha P Johnson, and Mendick herself].
Like much of your work, Off With Her Head mixed classical or historical references with contemporary and pop cultural ones. What effect does that have on how we understand the work?
Sometimes I don’t know whether the historical references are to add a sense of gravitas or to add a sense of understanding and comprehension, and to be able to be sillier or more humorous in the work. I suppose any good joke needs to have weight and truth within it. I’m always navigating those source points and symbols in my work because it’s so important to show how history just repeats and repeats and repeats.
When I was making Off With Her Head I kept thinking about how everyone likes a woman on the rise up. And enjoys her as long as they feel they can control her. But when it’s uncontrollable or somehow steps out of line, there’s an inevitable take down and it will always happen, even with a slight fall from grace.
But I also have OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] and I’m scared I’ve never done enough. I want to make a party. I want to make sure everyone has a good time. I leave every exhibition feeling like I achieved everything I set out to do, and hope it’s enough. But I quite often feel that it’s not.
Isn’t that often the case for artists? Is that dissatisfaction how artists keep making?
It’s like this irritation of feeling that you’d quite like to complete life, but you can’t. Every time I make a ceramic work I’ll get to a point of thinking, ‘This is the best thing I’ve done’, and then next time I’ll push it a bit further and I’ll be, ‘Oh god, I hate that now’!
It’s a restlessness, but I think that’s why it suits my personality so much, because I do have this restlessness that is unable to be satisfied. The only thing that does is art.
Speaking of satiation, your work is like a feast. You mentioned earlier the film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover [Peter Greenaway, 1989]. It’s a film that throws everything at you. It gives you more than you can consume…
I know that at some point I’m going to really hone in on that film. It’s so sumptuous and they don’t give up on the storyline. It’s over the top, hyper-produced, it’s so crafted. It’s just the end point, isn’t it!?
Yes, and where do you go from that?
I’m not sure he [Greenaway] did go anywhere. I think you have to change up your whole thing completely. After I’d been making the minutely constructed works for Off With Her Head and Till Death Do Us Part, I wanted to make in a way that was really physical and exciting.
Where the Bodies are Buried [Mendick’s major solo exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2023] was an attack. It was something I had to do that was very bodily for myself. I needed to not just use ceramic, I needed to use resin, I needed to create sculptures out of anything and everything and I wanted to attack them. I was pissed off with ceramics. The stability of ceramic doesn’t always capture the chaos of what my brain really feels like when I’m in a dark place.
I’m so glad that I went against the grain of myself to do something that I needed for me personally, rather than for a commercial purpose.
You and Guy Oliver started Quench Gallery in Margate during the pandemic. What motivated you to set it up?
Things were closing down because of the pandemic but I had just started selling more work and my editions were selling. There was a point where a lot of artists were selling, like through Artist Support Pledge.
The first tiny space we found fell through but we’d already done the Crowdfunder and got all the money. We lost it that day and Guy said to me, come on, keep positive. We walked along North Down Road to see if there was anything, not expecting to find a space, and we just saw this gallery – a big, perfect space – that was available to rent.
We took it for a year, thinking that’s as long as we’d do. But it’s so addictive. Gemma Pharo has come in and she’s just secured the money to make a weekly youth club. We have a great kids club in the summer too. Guy and Gemma bring in all the funding, they’re absolutely incredible. They navigate all the shows, they help curate. It’s a real massive feat. And I sell my editions to help fund it as well.
Gemma is in the process of making a ‘working class in the arts’ group that will meet and talk about different opportunities and have some mentoring. We’re going to have lessons on money and try to demystify some of the things in the arts, so being an artist seems achievable. It’s about giving people the strength and freedom to be able to take care of themselves and not be so dependent on other people.
Why do artist-led spaces matter?
What we’re seeing at the moment is a bizarre, frightening censorship of speaking and a lack of autonomy… the only way I feel that we can get around this is through artist-led spaces. We believe in freedom of speech at Quench and we will keep that going whether we have to be purely self-funded or whether we’ll be publicly funded in future. Whenever I’m feeling quite lost within politics or the outside world, one of the things I try to do is harness that and create something that’s the antithesis to it.
And there are so many younger artists or artists who need spurring on in their career, who we show at Quench. Plus those conversations about how you navigate the art world, how you navigate payment, all these things that people don’t tell you, but we can pass on that advice.
I feel that we’ve done something positive, when I sometimes felt quite helpless within the art world. The successes I’ve had in my career and with the gallery are testament to what you can do when you collaborate or what you can do when you support each other; I could never do any of this on my own.
Top image: Lindsey Mendick. Portrait by Elissa Cray
The exhibitions ‘Lithics’ by Emri Alrai and ‘Blinking, Glare’ by Bryony Rose continue at Quench Gallery until 17 March 2024 quenchgallery.co.uk
One year since we spoke to a-n member Lindsey Mendick at AWITA x a-n 2023, this interview marks International Women’s Day 2024, and five years of partnership with Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA). AWITA x a-n brings inspirational women together on International Women’s Day to recognise the important relationship between artists and art professionals. Visit awita.london to find out more.
