Lindsey Mendick – interview: ‘My brain is not my best friend’

What is it to be a woman who doesn’t have all her shit together and to be making work that is quite salacious or tongue in cheek? Lindsey Mendick opens up

Lindsey Mendick (b1987, London) is most definitely a name to watch, although, if you’re only being made aware of her now, where have you been? Based in Margate, and best friends with Tracey Emin, Mendick describes making art as “the funnest thing” she does and recalls seeing her first ceramics being fired in a kiln as akin to falling in love, with their tangibleness giving her a “very weird, grounded feeling”. Her confessional and candid work brings out the grotesque in the banal and the comic in the tragic as she dissects her relationships, her behaviour and the contents of her addled mind. Mendick has an MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art, and her recent commission SH*TFACED at Jupiter Artland won her the Sky Arts Award for Visual Arts.

Lindsey Mendick: Hot Mess, installation view, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, 23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Taking part in the second half of the Sainsbury Centre’s bold exhibition programme, investigating the question “Why Do We Take Drugs?”, Mendick’s installation in the Living Area of the gallery places her work alongside that of the grand matriarch of the grotesque and harrowing, Leonora Carrington, and the legendary and tormented big drinker, Francis Bacon. She lays bare her dependence on antidepressants and her not-entirely-healthy-but-not-as-shameful-as-it-feels use of alcohol as a social crutch. Everywhere, mice ransack the detritus of a drunken night out: the half empty fast-food boxes, the crushed cans, the overspilling ashtrays and the dropped contents of a woman’s handbag. “I think it’s easier,” Mendick says, “to see a mouse throwing up in her handbag than a human.” I think she’s right.

Lindsey Mendick: Hot Mess, installation view, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, 23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

As her ceramic sculptures came to life, Mendick welcomed Studio International into her studio in Margate and talked candidly about what it is to be “a woman who doesn’t have all her shit together” and to be making work that is “quite salacious or tongue-in cheek”.

Lindsey Mendick: Hot Mess
Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

Interview by ANNA McNAY
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Lindsey Mendick: Hot Mess, installation view, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, 23 November 2024 – 27 April 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.