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New works, ideas in progress and events from Zoë Mendelson's studio
My research brings together interests in museology, architecture/ function and psychological space.
I have a multi-disciplinary practice with drawing pivotal, and relationships sustained between temporal and perennial supports. I mostly make drawing, collage, sculpture and site-specific installation.
I create embellished worlds manipulating idealised spaces and gentility and employing their codes as a cover for seductive excess and psychiatric ‘disorder’. My work takes place on paper, walls, and within communication devices and objects. With conflicting roots in decoration and the functionality proposed by Modernist thought, these dislocated narratives play off intimations of desire, awkwardness and reason.
Painstakingly drawn, these fictions become obsessive and analogue mechanics are referred to in the work as allegories for process. Defunct slide/film projectors, staged as illusory devices, are switched off and allowed to falsely ‘project’ detailed drawings directly onto the wall.
The works relate to each other archivally: Sculptural/object-based pieces become museological and have the irritating arrogance of weight and historical association. Paper works allude to workings-out or chronicling of thought-processes. My wall-drawings are often fleeting – not unlike building elaborate sandcastles before high tide. The different media become vehicles for shifting notations of histories/case studies. They are linked thematically and by a labour-intensity regardless of longevity.
I am currently writing a novel (The Detroit Project) across dimensions and have been awarded AHRC funding towards a doctorate which includes its development. It concerns the altering function and psychology of architectural space and is in textual, drawn and theatrical form.