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.
At the heart of the matter, however, to the extent that this low-energy affair has a centre, is a plotline in which a character was murdered and buried under a patio. The country, we are told via a scratchy video imitating a worn VHS tape that flickers on monitor screens, was kept waiting for two years until the corpse was uncovered.
Ceramics, furnishings and even stained glass are scattered among the staging to suggest the obsessional image of a buried body. A headless zombie sits in an armchair, flowers erupting from its torso. The lifesize figure is made of pottery, right down to its shoes, while the flowers and comfy chair are real. Elsewhere, ceramic maggots and snails infest the remains of TV dinners and rats pick at entrails by glistening bin bags – all made of pottery.
These are imaginative, skilful creations, both lovely and menacing. Or they might be if their impact was not drowned out by the visual equivalent of white noise. There are blobs of bubbly hardened foam, fake blood and scattered flowerpots all over the place and the pop culture “references” are so restless and scattergun they destroy meaning. The most powerful image in the show, a stained-glass window of a living cadaver walking the Earth, has its medieval strangeness undermined by the addition of a Reebok trainer, a Marathon chocolate bar and a bottle of Hooch. But where has Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo wandered in from? And why are there Scream masks all over the place?
It’s as if Mendick is continually chuckling as she puts it all together, in a hilariously misspent art class on a long school afternoon. I remember art classes like that – but my clay guitar exploded in the kiln so it clearly wasn’t my subject. If you do become an artist, you need to remember it’s not a private joke. The finished work has to communicate to stone cold strangers. I am drawn to the comic exuberance of Mendick and her naughty pots, her antidotes to art that proclaims its own importance. Here, though, she needs to take herself more seriously. What are you trying to say? What do you want the onlooker to take away?
Ultimately, this installation avoids the severity of its own subject. It is all about death. Yet everything here runs to dodge the reality of that. We are told about a murder, but it wasn’t real, only a story in a now defunct soap opera. And while the ceramics are jolly, they are too colourful and fun to make you think about your own or anyone else’s mortality. Not all art has to be tragic but art about death does need to comprehend the weight of what it is pondering. When Hamlet holds up Yorick’s skull, he jokes about death to make it more perturbing, not less.
Visitors to Yorkshire Sculpture Park seemed as politely baffled as me by why the hell we need to revisit a long-ago TV crime. The creative kiln of this artist needs tempering with conceptual clarity and emotional focus. Without that, her installation is speaking to itself over a maggoty TV dinner.
• At Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, West Yorkshire, until 3 September.
