Lindsey Mendick to open large-scale confessional show SH*TFACED- For Jupiter Artland, Lindsey Mendick is creating three monumental installations inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, bringing this famous victorian morality tale up-to-date with her signature humour and subversive style. This will be the artist’s first institutional solo presentation in Scotland and coincides with Edinburgh Art Festival (August 11th-27th).
Lindsey Mendick (b. 1987) has rapidly established herself as one of the most important artists of her generation. Working predominantly with clay, she houses her artwork in life-like installations, recreating scenes from her personal life – dinner parties, night club toilets, living rooms and dance floors. Her highly crafted ceramics vases, sculptures and stained glass artworks populate these environments, bursting with surreal detail, with animal and vegetal forms that exude a protean energy. SH*TFACED at Jupiter Artland will be the artist’s largest commission to date, taking inspiration from Scotland’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to present a contemporary view of duality and supposed binaries between good and evil, virtue and depravity and gender roles.
Lindsey Mendick’s work is one of confession, where taboo topics and uncomfortable truths are revealed with candour and humour. Her work is characterised by an intense attention to detail and verisimilitude, whereby everyday scenes are expertly crafted in ceramic and staged in larger-than-life tableaux. Like an anxiety dream come to life, there is a sobering mirroring of contemporary binge drinking culture and gender-based shaming presented in the work, although the anticipated judgemental tone is noticeably absent. By subverting the genre of morality tale, Mendick’s work opens a space where our public and private faces can be encountered without prejudice.
I look forward to Lindsey delving into the culture of drink and self-regret at Jupiter Artland, especially relevant to these times.
says Nicky Wilson, Director of Jupiter Artland.
As part of Jupiter Artland’s public programmes across the summer, Jupiter and Edinburgh Art Festival are co-commissioning Lindsey to curate a one-night-only edition of our annual Jupiter Rising festival alongside some of Scotland’s best DJs, artists and performers. This free event continues Jupiter’s mission to support artists at every stage of their career.
Taking place across Jupiter’s Ballroom, Steadings Galleries, and Dovecot Gallery, the exhibition is a triptych of sociability enabled by excessive consumption. Within the neo-baroque Ballroom, the end of a dinner party plays out upon a mirrored dining table, with dinner guests represented by vases that are both exquisite and grotesque in equal measure. As a counterpoint to the splendour of the Ballroom, Mendick confronts viewers with a more tongue-and-cheek view of contemporary nightlife in the Steadings Gallery. Mendick creates a nightclub scene with the toilets becoming a stage upon which life’s dramas, emotions, friendships and sometimes unpleasant realities unfold. Finally in the Dove Cot, Mendick has created a very personal film with her partner and collaborator, Guy Oliver, where they explore the toll that alcohol takes on their relationship.
In speaking about her commission for Jupiter Artland, Mendick says
Duality is in all of us, we’re neither fully good nor bad. What makes us so fascinating as subjects to draw upon are those gritty nuances of self. I was drawn to the story of Jekyll and Hyde because it resonated deeply with my daily inner struggles navigating the realities I face day to day. We ask modern women to be the perfect balance of chaotic and restrained. It’s exhausting. In the novella, Jekyll feels a burning desire to break free of the puritanical constraints of Victorian society. But in order to be completely free, he would have to give up his social standing. So he creates Hyde. He splits the darker side from himself.
To quote from the novel:
There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.
In Mendick’s words:
But then, the next morning, the mortal dread and shame of my reckless behaviour sets in. And yet again… I pay penance, I clamour back to being good.
Lindsey Mendick, SH*T FACED: 15th July 2023 1st October 2023, Jupiter Artland
Lindsey Mendick graduated from Royal College of Art in 2017 and is currently based in Margate. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate and most recently at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Her work was also included in the major exhibition Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art at the Hayward Gallery, London. With her partner, the artist Guy Oliver, Mendick initiated Quench Gallery in Margate to provide vital support for early career artists through exhibitions and mentoring.
