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Zoë Mendelson (born 17 April 1976) is a London-based British artist. Her father is television comedy writer Paul Mendelson.

Biography

Mendelson studied Fine Art, Painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design from 1995 to 1998 and Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1998 to 2000. She gained her practice-based PhD in 2015 from Central Saint Martins.

Zoë Mendelson lives and works in London and is Course Leader for Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts. At Wimbledon she co-convenes the network paintingresearch with fellow artist, Geraint Evans. Mendelson's studio is in East London at Chisenhale Art Place, where she has worked for ten years.

Mendelson has shown widely, predominantly in Europe, including at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris in 2005 and Chapter Centre for Contemporary Arts in Cardiff in 2006. She speaks regularly at conferences and symposia, often engaging performance as a medium for giving papers.

Work

Zoë Mendelson is an artist and writer. Her work incorporates animation, collage, drawing, installation, performance and fiction writing. The work refers to histories of painting and relationships to flatness and illusion.

Using collation as a methodological framework Mendelson creates networks between psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapeutic practice, spatial theory, fine art and critical practice. Her PhD, at Central Saint Martins, was titled ‘Psychologies and Spaces of Accumulation: The hoard as collagist methodology (and other stories)’. This research locates and spatialises systematised archiving alongside seemingly pathological object relations, and includes relationships drawn between urban space and wellness.

In 2012 Mendelson received large scale funding for a project entitled ‘This Mess is a Place’, supported by Wellcome Trust and produced by Artsadmin. The project focused on psychopathology of hoarding at its intersection with rationalised collection. It was timed to coincide with the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its inclusion of Hoarding Disorder. Mendelson’s research engages disorder as a culturally produced phenomenon, in parallel to its clinical counterpart, suggesting its value to knowledge production within Fine Art and critical theory.

In 2014 Mendelson was a selected member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Wellcome Trust funded New Generations programme for early career researchers in the Medical Humanities at the University of Durham.

In 2010 four of Mendelson's works were selected by Artsadmin and Iwona Blazwick to be permanently installed at Town Hall Hotel, London.

In 2007 Mendelson made a temporal online work commissioned by Cartier. Titled The Envelope Machine'it referenced advances in postal technologies at the time of the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and operated as a hand drawn, and ultimately unrequited, version of Outlook Express.

Also in 2007, Mendelson received an Arts Council England Grant for the Arts to create a work called Scheherezade's Sideboard which has since been shown at Transition Gallery, London and Galerie Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers.

As part of a solo show on 26 November 2008 Mendelson performed with a sugarcrafter at Galerie Édouard Manet, Gennevilliers. For four hours they constructed drawn and sugared sandcastles, which were then eaten and erased.

Bibliography

• Oct 2015: Museum of the Unwanted, pub. Kunstmuseum Olten, 66 pages, colour.
• Oct. 2013: This Mess is a Place: A Collapsible Anthology of Collections and Clutter, 205 pages. Edited, Compiled and misfiled by Zoë Mendelson, funded Wellcome Trust, pub. And Publishing.
• Sept. 2011: Inconscients! (Les artistes et la psychanalyse), 170 pages, colour, Galerie Alfa, Paris
• March 2010: The Journal of Performance Research, Transplantations issue, 4 artists’ pages, (ed. Phillip Warnell), pub. Routledge.
• Jan 2008: Same as It Ever Was', colour, hard cover catalogue, The Arts Gallery, London
• Fable, Exhibition Catalogue, Angela Kingston and Gordon Dalton, Chapter Publications, ISBN 1-900029-22-7
• J'en rêve, Exhibition Catalogue, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, ISBN 978-2-7427-5776-3
• The Artist's Yearbook, Ed. Ossian Ward, essay by Zoe Mendelson, pub. Thames & Hudson, editions 2007 and 2008/09, ISBN 978-0-500-28613-5; ISBN 978-0-500-28692-0

External links

• Artist's website
• Artist's blog
• Chapter Centre for the Contemporary Arts
• Fondation Cartier de l’Art Contemporain

• 1976 births
• British draughtsmen
• Collage artists
• Living people