Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present By A Thread, a sculptural installation by Lindsey Mendick in The Box, the gallery's micro-project space.
Mendick works primarily with hand-built ceramics, constructing immersive installations that fuse autobiography, pop culture, and myth into theatrical, often grotesque environments. Her practice subverts preconceived associations between clay and the decorative arts, using the medium instead as a narrative and psychological device, in which humour and horror coexist.
In By A Thread, gilded moths feast on the lustrous vessel and its plush hand-knitted surroundings, nibbling holes in fabric and fraying the edges of clay. Throughout her work, insects such as cockroaches, caterpillars, and moths proliferate, acting as symbols of infestation and bodily unease. Mendick evokes the sensation of something internal gradually eating away at the body, whether it be grief, anxiety, memory, or desire. Through this interplay of the seductive and the abject, By A Thread explores vulnerability, beauty, and destruction as simultaneous truths.
With its blistered and bitten forms, in By A Thread the vase becomes a stand-in for the body, something that is shaped to contain, yet is inherently vulnerable. Mendick is informed in part by Anne Carson’s writing on women in her 2012 collection Men in the Off Hours and in her 1990 essay Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire. In these texts Carson reinterprets the classical trope of likening female sexuality to a leaky vessel in need of male control, opting instead to highlight the liquid, transgressive nature of femininity, which disrupts the patriarchal order. For Mendick, this framework interrogates fragility, containment, and transformation, as the stability of the object appears to dissolve. Mendick pushes clay, a static, solid material, into a state that feels fluid and unsettled, as if melting, rupturing, or being slowly consumed.
Lindsey Mendick (b. 1987, UK) lives and works in Margate, UK. She received her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London (2017). Later this year she will be included in British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers, curated by Ekow Eshun with Hayward Gallery Touring. Her institutional solo exhibitions include Jupiter Artland, Dundee and Edinburgh (2025; 2023); Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (2024); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2023); Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv (2021); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2020); and Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018), amongst others. Her recent group exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Appenzell (2025); Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2025); Wellcome Collection, London (2024); Royal Academy, London (2023); Somerset House, London (2022; 2021); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2021); and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York, NY (2021); amongst many others. Mendick was the recipient of the Sky Arts Visual Art Award in 2024, the Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020, the Alexandra Reinhardt memorial award in 2018, and was also selected for the Jerwood Survey 2019 and the Future Generations Art Prize 2020. Her public collections include the Arts Council Collection, UK, and Government Art Collection, UK.