zack mennell

My work often begins with a haunting: an image that will not leave me, a phrase that catches and keeps catching, a material that seems to ask something of my body. I follow these compulsions through doing - cutting, soaking, taping, sewing, recording, carrying, wearing, exposing, re-speaking. Making is a way of thinking with my hands, with my skin, with memory, with whatever strange thing has washed up or been dragged home. I work across performance, analogue photography, writing, film and installation, using slowness, improvisation and site-responsive research to stay with what is unstable, excessive, unresolved.

I am drawn to thresholds: between body and site, document and wound, archive and gossip, shame and desire, injury and joke, human and other-than-human. My practice moves through queer embodiment, madness, institutionalisation, ecology and power, not as separate subjects but as entangled conditions. I am interested in what survives contact - what stains, what leaks, what fogs, what refuses to settle. Difficulty does not need to be cleaned up before it can be shared. I want the work to hold its mess, its charge, its oddness.

Performance gives me a way to make pressure visible. In my work, bureaucratic language, medical histories, found materials, and personal relics can be reconfigured into gestures, creatures, environments and scores. A symptom may become a river-being; a letter may become costume; an archive may become a site of cruising, misdirection, concealment or encounter. The figures that appear in the work are not escapes from myself but concentrations of force - ways for private histories, social systems, ecological damage and bodily strangeness to meet in forms that are not quite human, but not separate from me either.

Analogue processes are central to this. I return to film, tape, cloth, chalk, spit, paper, water and light because they change under pressure. They absorb, distort, decay, bruise, tear, and record. They insist on time, error and contact. In this sense, the image is not proof but residue: a partial trace of a meeting between bodies, histories and materials. I am especially interested in archives and historic image-making practices where visibility has been shaped by authority - by medicalisation, classification, shame, surveillance or violence - and in how those structures might be interrupted, troubled or remade through collaborative and consent-led forms.

Others have described my work as attentive to thresholds of visibility and presence, and I recognise that. I am trying to make spaces where things can appear without being fully pinned down; where opacity, contradiction and unstable relation are not failures but conditions of being alive. Across live art, portraiture, writing and installation, I think of the work as a temporary pact: something held between people, materials, histories and place for a certain amount of time. Not comfort exactly, not healing exactly, but a charged form of attention. A way of staying with what lingers. A way of making contact under difficult conditions.

Much of this thinking comes through the Essex Thames Estuary, where I grew up in a landscape radically altered by excavation, industry, landfill and development. There, prehistoric remains, industrial extraction, housing and recent ruin sit in unstable relation. Sites where land has been cut open for chalk and brick-earth, then abandoned, infilled, or reclaimed, have shaped how I understand landscape: not as a backdrop, but as a layered record of pressure, damage, habitation, and return. I am interested in what survives through matter - residue, traces, fragments, wounds, surfaces and afterlives - and in how bodies encounter those layered histories through walking, image-making, performance and material attention.