The body of Trevor Jordache lay beneath the patio for two years before it was discovered during the investigation into an underground leak on Channel 4’s Brookside in 1995. Audiences had infinitely more patience last century. Nowadays, reflects Jimmy Corkhill (played magnificently, then and through this new show, by Dean Sullivan), they couldn’t possibly wait that long. The corpse would have been dug up in two weeks.
Sullivan performs his monologue on television sets positioned at random intervals through Where the Bodies Are Buried, Lindsey Mendick’s colossal installation for the Weston Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The sound is as duff as any Brookie-era telly, but still you can hear his character’s meditations everywhere you go. Corkhill remembers his own childhood, watching frightening crime on TV with his father, exhausted after a long shift. And the memory of his father’s heartbeat seems to set off another soundtrack through the gallery; this time it is the pulsing heart that haunts the murderer in Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying short story The Tell-Tale Heart.
Mendick has gone even further than usual in her latest multimedia extravaganza. Born in London in 1987 and now based in Margate, she is most famous for her wild ceramics. Anyone who saw last year’s Strange Clay at the Hayward Gallery may remember her hideous domestic dystopia, where ceramic slugs, rats and cockroaches crawled through a kitchen full of broken promises written on ceramic Post-it notes. Marriage was presented as a terminal fate; the work’s title was Till Death Do Us Part.
The autobiographical Hairy on the Inside – sardonic, raucous, moving – was set in a surgery, where the waiting patients were werewolves in girlish wigs, their medical gowns printed with a pattern of wombs. Excessive hair growth is only one of the fierce agonies of polycystic ovary syndrome, which may also cause infertility, and from which Mendick suffers.
The sense, in Where the Bodies Are Buried, is again of something deeply personal that is also shared: in this case, growing up with British television. Clips familiar from a thousand nights in front of the small screen flicker and dissolve: Inspector Morse, Cracker, the Boddingtons ad, Brookside. And all around them are the remains of TV dinners slithered with ceramic insects, remote controls overgrown on the floor, and the relics of those who seem to have died on the sofa.
The bottom half of a man, in lifesize cloth effigy, sprouts electric wires from its slippered feet. From the waist up is nothing but flowers. Skeletal hands claw up through the floorboards. Plywood rafters imply attics, from which bloodstained insulation sprouts, but also basements with sporadic holes in the floor. And down below are the bodies of the dead, in open graves. Most impressive of all is a stained-glass man, not much more than some bones and a skull, identifiable only, perhaps, by the indestructible logo on his trainers.
You go round and around all this without ever getting to the end (or the bottom) of it all. Mendick likens it, in the accompanying pamphlet, to the intrusiveness of pure obsessive thought disorder and recurrent anxiety dreams. The atmosphere is nightmarish, queasy; the objects, cast mostly in iridescent ceramic, deliberately repellent. This is gothic horror for the television age.
Yet the shadow of Poe doesn’t quite carry as far as it could. And to some extent, no matter how violent the historic allusions, particularly to real crime news in the north, the scenarios are self-consciously melodramatic. It is as if Mendick, with her abundant energy and exuberant detail, couldn’t quite help sending it all up.
About half a mile away, across the park, the New York-based African American artist Leonardo Drew has filled the 18th-century chapel with what appears to be a massive uprush of blackened fragments that rise in something that might be a mushroom cloud or some enormous tree. Look closely and it becomes apparent that each of the many thousands of elements is not in fact burned so much as immaculately painted, and each connected to the next by the most delicate hidden joinery.
Drew grew up near a city dump and found in it what he called his treasure trove. Tiny fragments shored up against ruin – biblical, historic, industrial – have become his theme, as well as his modus operandi. Small, framed abstract works in this show are formed out of dense aggregations of painted grit and dust – the green and turquoise of ancient bronze and copper monuments. Climb the staircase to the choir stalls above and you see the massive central sculpture blossoming up high into subtle colour.
The work speaks perfectly to the place – a chapel reached by walking among lambs and spring trees through a graveyard. The cycles of life and death have been honoured here for centuries. And now they are again, in Drew’s explosion of a structure, apparently a dead thing but gradually flourishing into life. The artist has understood what makes the chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park so unique, and made a virtue of it – the unexpected vantage points of this two-tier gallery.
Star ratings (out of five)
Lindsey Mendick: Where the Bodies Are Buried ★★★
Leonardo Drew ★★★★
• Lindsey Mendick: Where the Bodies Are Buried is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 3 September
• Leonardo Drew is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 29 October
