London artist Zoe Mendelson creates a sexual candyland in her paintings, drawings, and murals. While this can become a narrative fantasy world, there is no explicit story being told - sexual organs and acts morph/flow seamlessly into flora, fauna, and creatures. Like most artists I tend to gravitate towards, the beauty in her work, and the preciseness of its detail, captures the viewer's attention first, reeling you in to discover a world where things are a bit off.
Zoe Mendelson received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2000. Upcoming exhibitions include a group show at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a summer residency and solo exhibition at Plane Space Gallery, New York, a two-person show with Joel Tomlin at Transition in London, as well as a Fondation Cartier/Cartier artist commission for the online project "How far would you go for Love?." Her work has been published in Tokion magazine, Tetu Magazine, Lovely Daze, Time Out London, the Guardian, and others. Mendelson lives and works in London.
Caryn Coleman: Your new paintings have a real painterly quality to them. Do you find that these paintings allow you to be looser/more free-flowing than your meticulous drawings?
Zoe Mendelson: Oddly, no. Conversely I find huge freedom in losing myself in the meticulousness of the drawings. I love the immediacy of drawing and the way the pen feels like a bodily extension. Drawing in this way there is very little physical distance between my hand and the paper or my hand and the wall. I find this raw connection with the surface to be as viceral as paint is pre-supposed to be. The paintings start off life as meticulous drawings and a process of unravelling occurs through the medium. Without this, initially precise, hook on which to hang the paint I think I would be very lost. There is a lot of stopping and starting in the painting - A lot of mixing, squeezing, cleaning and selecting. Somewhere in the middle of a painting though, I do start to feel as though all of this has sped up and I have lost some of the attachment to the line. Sometimes a painting can seem to rest on this moment and the decisions about where to leave the under-drawing exposed - a kind of painterliness does then take over in areas. I can see how the paint would always read as looser and more free-flowing even when it is where the struggle occurs. The medium itself seems to invite this once it has abandoned all its supporting equipment.
CC: Your statement says that your work deals with obsessions. Are you an obsessive artist and person?
ZM: Yes. I do sometimes wonder what I'd be doing if drawing didn't, in some way, contain the mania: I am not interested in doing anything without total absorption. The obsession is probably more evident in the act of making the work than it is thematic.
I am not sure where to separate the artist from the person here! I am a chaotic person and am not frightened of disorder but I obsess over language, nuance and detail, often at the expense of the bigger picture. I don't find myself being obsessive over small tasks or mundanity though (I don't care about how to pack a suitcase or keep files in order) but I can see the pull of this. Despite doing it every day, drawing in this way still feels like an extreme experience and is seductive as such.
CC: In your statement for your March 2006 exhibition at, it says that your work provides: "inconclusive narratives are historical fictions borne out of contemporary fantasies." Where does your interest lie in constructing history, i.e. making a history out of a fantastical context?
ZN:I think, in a way, that I am much less interested in actual history than I am in historiography, or its re-telling. I get excited by what is lost and found in the story-telling which supposedly attaches itself to truth.
CC:You play a lot with juxtapositions - nature with architecture, victorian vs. contemporary, roots in children's book drawing and erotic drawing - seemingly opposites that actually go quite well together. Do you find that these combinations reflect a sense of where we were versus where we're going?
ZM:In crude terms this began for me in exploring how a sex act could be made elegant and a chandelier titillating through the nature of their drawing, embellishment (or lack of it) and juxtaposition. Some of the opposites which now occur in the work have grown from this point. One of the most important juxtapositions or opposites which concerns me is in trying to keep the work stuffed down a gap between what is public and what is private. I grew up being dragged round museums with a clipboard (and am now torturing my own son the same way) and have always been excited by those personal histories which are made public through display. There has always been, for me, a real pleasure in the discomfort this can invite.
With regard to your question about time, I think I'm being less specific about actual directions than I am fascinated by collage and the history of the museum as a cabinet of wonders. I am intrigued as to how histories can be shaped through decisions over the gathering or placement of objects. Most of my drawings start their lives as individual elements drawn on separate sheets before being collaged together without rescaling. Composition happens quite late on in the drawing process and these elements end up falsely gathered together by a commonality in the line. I hope that, through theatrical staging, individual motifs, such as giant squid, disembodied hair or theatre boxes take on a misleadingly iconic significance.
One of my current preoccupations is with false memory syndrome. I love the notion that because of the reconstructive nature of memory we can believe ourselves to have been present simply through collecting or being repeatedly exposed to images/narratives. I love that information repeated in culture has this effect on us. In the same vein it interests me that there are obscure cross-references which appear generationally among artists which seems to reflect a communal exposure to stories, information or other imagery: An overlapping ingestion. I look at artists such as Marcel Dzama, Dorota Jurczak and Matt Greene and can see a niggling commonality which suggests that at some point since about 1972 we've all breathed the same unconscious air.
I have attached to this mail a photo I took in LA in December which kick-started some of the work I have been making. It does seem to relate very closely to what you bring up about imagining future fantasy spaces. On seeing it I felt it summed up what excited me about creating spaces which exist in-flight between eras, places and tropes of meaning.
CC:The women in your paintings are overtly sexual and yet seem innocent at the same time. What do these women signify for you and what do you see the function of these women being in the work?
ZM:A challenge in my work is in wanting the sex to sit behind other less supposedly in-your-face visual material. I once went to a lecture by someone who was working in the science of fragrances. She talked about how when constructing a perfume it was possible (and, indeed, essential) to layer the different scents so they appeared in a kind of olfactory order. Apparently you can stage smells to appear one by one. I immediately wanted to see if this could be translated into my drawings. In the UK there is soft porn everywhere on the newstands and yet it still has the power to jump out at you as you pass. This visibilty reminds me of how ones own name can jump out of large blocks of text. I want to use sexual imagery as a composite part of a sensory experience without it being the primary or first-noticed element. It is a constant struggle to seek out what imagery could sit in front of an overt sex act and/or overtake it in sensuality or even lewdness. I try to draw fauna, furniture etc. in a viceral, seducing manner so it can take on this role.
The adult material in my work is also a, perhaps clunky, reference to the actual making of the pieces. The deeply personal and private act of drawing has a masturbatory element to it - its crescendo, its fantasy, and the self-satisfaction and self-deprocation it can evoke in equal measure!
I do think the innocence you describe is inherent in the simple outlining of my women and their descriptive reduction (as they straddle the association of the nursery and botany) but it also exists - before I draw them - in the fantasies depicted in the porn available. The women in adult material do tend to inhabit a bipolar world of 'virtuous' and 'slutty'. Such is the nature of the beast!
CC:You work in a variety of mediums - paper, wood, wall murals, and furniture. How do these differing avenues relate back to each other? Also, when you do wall murals, do you take steps to preserve the work or do you embrace the temporal aspect of them?
ZM: I think you've hit the nail on the head here by mentioning permanence in the same breath as the different media. In a way I think the works are starting to relate to each other archivally. The furniture pieces become museological and have the irritating arrogance of weight and historical association. The paper works (which are made on transparent film) have a flimsiness and relationship to books and the illustrative which allude to a kind of chronicling or flicking through of dreams. The wall pieces disappear altogether and as such are fleeting and making them reminds me of building elaborate sandcastles speedily before a high tide. The various media become different vehicles for notation of histories. They are linked by their themes and by the same labour intensity regardless of temporality. I find it incredibly exciting to make works which disappear - I like that I am freed from leaving something behind and the age-old notion of the artist as terrified of his own mortality. I never really look at these wall-drawings once they are finished. On a personal level they are performative and when the making is over I leave them behind.
CC: It seems like there is a lot of new exciting galleries and artists currently in England and even outside of London in Newcastle and Gateshead in North East England. What are your thoughts on the current London/British art scene?
ZM: London is my home town but I have lived away in the countryside for four years and just returned this month. I did feel start to feel its pull dramatically (ok, so I was clawing the walls!) although it is a very financially draining place to live as an artist as an antidote to all there is to glean from its bustle. With the huge conglomerate of the University of the Arts there is an enormous population of international art students in London, unrivalled elsewhere in the world, who, obviously, contribute massively to the energy of the place. There are some long standing artist-run spaces which are innovative and stay afloat in London despite the expense - Cathy Lomax's Transition, for example, is a real staple of the East End scene. There are also some edgy artist-run publications such as Olivia Plender's 'Untitled'.
The spaces growing up in other towns are also very exciting. For me, the most interesting activity is definitely in the public galleries such as the Ikon in Birmingham, Chapter in Cardiff or the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland. As you mention, the North East is a current hot spot. The difficulty in these areas is that there are good art schools and small artist-run spaces in studio complexes but very little of a contemporary commercial scene. This makes London really the only city to see emerging international artists who would not yet have been offered shows in larger public spaces. There are exceptions, of course, and spaces such as Vane (Newcastle), Doggerfisher (Edinburgh) and the Modern Institute (Glasgow) make inroads in shifting this imbalance. I remember reading recently in a newspaper that Glasgow has been voted the town to be living as an artist in the UK. .. I am a fountain of useless geographical knowledge... As London gets harder and harder to live in I imagine other towns are benefitting from its artists running away. I actually visit less spaces outside London than I would like to. It's cheaper to fly to Europe than take a train in the UK! You can get from London to Berlin for 10 return but it costs a small fortune to get to Manchester.
For more on the artist visit her website
Zoe Mendelson received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2000. Upcoming exhibitions include a group show at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a summer residency and solo exhibition at Plane Space Gallery, New York, a two-person show with Joel Tomlin at Transition in London, as well as a Fondation Cartier/Cartier artist commission for the online project "How far would you go for Love?." Her work has been published in Tokion magazine, Tetu Magazine, Lovely Daze, Time Out London, the Guardian, and others. Mendelson lives and works in London.
Caryn Coleman: Your new paintings have a real painterly quality to them. Do you find that these paintings allow you to be looser/more free-flowing than your meticulous drawings?
Zoe Mendelson: Oddly, no. Conversely I find huge freedom in losing myself in the meticulousness of the drawings. I love the immediacy of drawing and the way the pen feels like a bodily extension. Drawing in this way there is very little physical distance between my hand and the paper or my hand and the wall. I find this raw connection with the surface to be as viceral as paint is pre-supposed to be. The paintings start off life as meticulous drawings and a process of unravelling occurs through the medium. Without this, initially precise, hook on which to hang the paint I think I would be very lost. There is a lot of stopping and starting in the painting - A lot of mixing, squeezing, cleaning and selecting. Somewhere in the middle of a painting though, I do start to feel as though all of this has sped up and I have lost some of the attachment to the line. Sometimes a painting can seem to rest on this moment and the decisions about where to leave the under-drawing exposed - a kind of painterliness does then take over in areas. I can see how the paint would always read as looser and more free-flowing even when it is where the struggle occurs. The medium itself seems to invite this once it has abandoned all its supporting equipment.
CC: Your statement says that your work deals with obsessions. Are you an obsessive artist and person?
ZM: Yes. I do sometimes wonder what I'd be doing if drawing didn't, in some way, contain the mania: I am not interested in doing anything without total absorption. The obsession is probably more evident in the act of making the work than it is thematic.
I am not sure where to separate the artist from the person here! I am a chaotic person and am not frightened of disorder but I obsess over language, nuance and detail, often at the expense of the bigger picture. I don't find myself being obsessive over small tasks or mundanity though (I don't care about how to pack a suitcase or keep files in order) but I can see the pull of this. Despite doing it every day, drawing in this way still feels like an extreme experience and is seductive as such.
CC: In your statement for your March 2006 exhibition at, it says that your work provides: "inconclusive narratives are historical fictions borne out of contemporary fantasies." Where does your interest lie in constructing history, i.e. making a history out of a fantastical context?
ZN:I think, in a way, that I am much less interested in actual history than I am in historiography, or its re-telling. I get excited by what is lost and found in the story-telling which supposedly attaches itself to truth.
CC:You play a lot with juxtapositions - nature with architecture, victorian vs. contemporary, roots in children's book drawing and erotic drawing - seemingly opposites that actually go quite well together. Do you find that these combinations reflect a sense of where we were versus where we're going?
ZM:In crude terms this began for me in exploring how a sex act could be made elegant and a chandelier titillating through the nature of their drawing, embellishment (or lack of it) and juxtaposition. Some of the opposites which now occur in the work have grown from this point. One of the most important juxtapositions or opposites which concerns me is in trying to keep the work stuffed down a gap between what is public and what is private. I grew up being dragged round museums with a clipboard (and am now torturing my own son the same way) and have always been excited by those personal histories which are made public through display. There has always been, for me, a real pleasure in the discomfort this can invite.
With regard to your question about time, I think I'm being less specific about actual directions than I am fascinated by collage and the history of the museum as a cabinet of wonders. I am intrigued as to how histories can be shaped through decisions over the gathering or placement of objects. Most of my drawings start their lives as individual elements drawn on separate sheets before being collaged together without rescaling. Composition happens quite late on in the drawing process and these elements end up falsely gathered together by a commonality in the line. I hope that, through theatrical staging, individual motifs, such as giant squid, disembodied hair or theatre boxes take on a misleadingly iconic significance.
One of my current preoccupations is with false memory syndrome. I love the notion that because of the reconstructive nature of memory we can believe ourselves to have been present simply through collecting or being repeatedly exposed to images/narratives. I love that information repeated in culture has this effect on us. In the same vein it interests me that there are obscure cross-references which appear generationally among artists which seems to reflect a communal exposure to stories, information or other imagery: An overlapping ingestion. I look at artists such as Marcel Dzama, Dorota Jurczak and Matt Greene and can see a niggling commonality which suggests that at some point since about 1972 we've all breathed the same unconscious air.
I have attached to this mail a photo I took in LA in December which kick-started some of the work I have been making. It does seem to relate very closely to what you bring up about imagining future fantasy spaces. On seeing it I felt it summed up what excited me about creating spaces which exist in-flight between eras, places and tropes of meaning.
CC:The women in your paintings are overtly sexual and yet seem innocent at the same time. What do these women signify for you and what do you see the function of these women being in the work?
ZM:A challenge in my work is in wanting the sex to sit behind other less supposedly in-your-face visual material. I once went to a lecture by someone who was working in the science of fragrances. She talked about how when constructing a perfume it was possible (and, indeed, essential) to layer the different scents so they appeared in a kind of olfactory order. Apparently you can stage smells to appear one by one. I immediately wanted to see if this could be translated into my drawings. In the UK there is soft porn everywhere on the newstands and yet it still has the power to jump out at you as you pass. This visibilty reminds me of how ones own name can jump out of large blocks of text. I want to use sexual imagery as a composite part of a sensory experience without it being the primary or first-noticed element. It is a constant struggle to seek out what imagery could sit in front of an overt sex act and/or overtake it in sensuality or even lewdness. I try to draw fauna, furniture etc. in a viceral, seducing manner so it can take on this role.
The adult material in my work is also a, perhaps clunky, reference to the actual making of the pieces. The deeply personal and private act of drawing has a masturbatory element to it - its crescendo, its fantasy, and the self-satisfaction and self-deprocation it can evoke in equal measure!
I do think the innocence you describe is inherent in the simple outlining of my women and their descriptive reduction (as they straddle the association of the nursery and botany) but it also exists - before I draw them - in the fantasies depicted in the porn available. The women in adult material do tend to inhabit a bipolar world of 'virtuous' and 'slutty'. Such is the nature of the beast!
CC:You work in a variety of mediums - paper, wood, wall murals, and furniture. How do these differing avenues relate back to each other? Also, when you do wall murals, do you take steps to preserve the work or do you embrace the temporal aspect of them?
ZM: I think you've hit the nail on the head here by mentioning permanence in the same breath as the different media. In a way I think the works are starting to relate to each other archivally. The furniture pieces become museological and have the irritating arrogance of weight and historical association. The paper works (which are made on transparent film) have a flimsiness and relationship to books and the illustrative which allude to a kind of chronicling or flicking through of dreams. The wall pieces disappear altogether and as such are fleeting and making them reminds me of building elaborate sandcastles speedily before a high tide. The various media become different vehicles for notation of histories. They are linked by their themes and by the same labour intensity regardless of temporality. I find it incredibly exciting to make works which disappear - I like that I am freed from leaving something behind and the age-old notion of the artist as terrified of his own mortality. I never really look at these wall-drawings once they are finished. On a personal level they are performative and when the making is over I leave them behind.
CC: It seems like there is a lot of new exciting galleries and artists currently in England and even outside of London in Newcastle and Gateshead in North East England. What are your thoughts on the current London/British art scene?
ZM: London is my home town but I have lived away in the countryside for four years and just returned this month. I did feel start to feel its pull dramatically (ok, so I was clawing the walls!) although it is a very financially draining place to live as an artist as an antidote to all there is to glean from its bustle. With the huge conglomerate of the University of the Arts there is an enormous population of international art students in London, unrivalled elsewhere in the world, who, obviously, contribute massively to the energy of the place. There are some long standing artist-run spaces which are innovative and stay afloat in London despite the expense - Cathy Lomax's Transition, for example, is a real staple of the East End scene. There are also some edgy artist-run publications such as Olivia Plender's 'Untitled'.
The spaces growing up in other towns are also very exciting. For me, the most interesting activity is definitely in the public galleries such as the Ikon in Birmingham, Chapter in Cardiff or the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland. As you mention, the North East is a current hot spot. The difficulty in these areas is that there are good art schools and small artist-run spaces in studio complexes but very little of a contemporary commercial scene. This makes London really the only city to see emerging international artists who would not yet have been offered shows in larger public spaces. There are exceptions, of course, and spaces such as Vane (Newcastle), Doggerfisher (Edinburgh) and the Modern Institute (Glasgow) make inroads in shifting this imbalance. I remember reading recently in a newspaper that Glasgow has been voted the town to be living as an artist in the UK. .. I am a fountain of useless geographical knowledge... As London gets harder and harder to live in I imagine other towns are benefitting from its artists running away. I actually visit less spaces outside London than I would like to. It's cheaper to fly to Europe than take a train in the UK! You can get from London to Berlin for 10 return but it costs a small fortune to get to Manchester.
For more on the artist visit her website
courtneyriot:
London artist Zoe Mendelson creates a sexual candyland in her paintings, drawings, and murals. While this can become a narrative fantasy world, there is no explicit story being told - sexual organs and acts morph/flow seamlessly into flora, fauna, and creatures. Like most artists I tend to gravitate...
rumford:
Great interview. I've been drawn to her work since I first saw one of her pieces two years ago.