Years before I first met Lindsey Mendick, I knew more intimate details of her life than I did those of my oldest friends. I knew about her past relationships: open and clandestine; coercive and crushing. I knew about sex with her exes, how she felt about her body, and theirs. I knew about her partner, the artist Guy Oliver, and her vampire fantasies (a card of Guy-as-a-vampire making love to Mendick is stuck to my fridge). I knew she suffered from polycystic ovary syndrome, and that it made her hirsute (which she hated) and possibly infertile (about which she was ambivalent).
I knew all this because of her art, which is ruthlessly, brutally honest about topics other people swerve even on a cabernet-lubricated girls’ night in. People react strongly to her work. Since moving to Margate during the pandemic, Mendick has become close to Tracey Emin, which figures. There’s a shared sensibility: if you’re going to mine personal experience, why hold back? (Except, Mendick will try to persuade me later, she does hold back.)
