Dr Zoë Mendelson (b. 1976) is an artist and writer with an expanded field practice that owes its spatialisation, historical narratives and compositional framework to painting. Her work includes various forms of writing (fiction and non-fiction), painting, collage, drawing, hand-driven animation, installation, and singing. Mendelson has exhibited widely showing works, performing and publishing, nationally and internationally. Her work is also installed permanently (visibly and covertly) in public buildings.
Zoë’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. Zoë's practice-based PhD (Central St Martins, 2015) examined hoarding in relation to collection via collagist methodologies. She is interested in how culture co-opts psychological and medical motifs and spectacularises them, leading to complex and widespread mis-readings. This has led her to produce artworks in direct response to imagery produced or used within medicine itself - particularly in diagnostics. She has a profound interest in ill-being as a place of potential agency and advocacy - at odds with a current focus on well-being as a ‘success’ narrative.
Zoë is Head of Painting & Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. In 2015 she was a selected member of the AHRC/Wellcome Trust funded New Generations programme for researchers in the Medical Humanities at the University of Durham. Zoë has co-curated the network paintingresearch with Geraint Evans (2015 - 2022) and is co-founder and editor of The Edit, an online and inclusive, de-canonised bibliography for students in Fine Art and related fields, now used in Arts education internationally.
Painting; Painting in an expanded field; Collage; Critical Medical Humanities; Visualising Medicine; Waste and Accumulation; Fictioning; Fine Art pedagogies
I am interested in supervising doctoral projects that connect to: Painting in an expanded field; Critical Medical Humanities; Waste and Discard Studies; Collection; Collage methodologies; Fictioning
Current PhD Students: Rebecca Meanley, 'A Hyper Present State' (Lead Supervisor); Yiyang Chen, 'Becoming Monstrous: Queer Feminist Reimagination of Archives, Bodies, and Space' (second supervisor).
