Anyone who has seen Lindsey Mendick’s glistening, obscene ceramics knows she has talent to burn. Unfortunately, in her most ambitious show to date, she does just that and takes a torch to her abilities, wasting them in a misguided installation that makes no sense, has no point and leaves you standing frustrated and numb on the outside of what looks to have been a very enjoyable creative process.
Although surrounded by sheep and statues amid Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s rolling dales, this is an indoor exhibition in a squarish, windowless gallery, which Mendick has filled with a big hollow frame of beams, planks and joists that suggests a half-finished suburban housing estate. It is meant to suggest the Merseyside close where the Channel 4 soap Brookside was set, running from 1982 until its cancellation in 2003. Mendick peppers her deconstructed “Brookside Close” with memories of this old show’s golden moments, including a sofa fabric printed with Anna Friel snogging Nicola Stephenson.
