You Make Me Sick

You Make Me Sick”, 2025 is the embroidery you will find on display in Seminar Room 9 entitled RE:ACT at the Courtauld Institute of Art.  Grandma Goldie Weinberg would never have imagined her handiwork on display on such hallowed walls in the company of work by Peter Kennard, Yi Zhou, Gracie Schylling, and Elizabeth O’Farrelly.  

The accompanying catalogue text written by Romy Brill Allen, Director of RE:VISION is a skilful document that describes and contextualises each work, its physicality in the space, how this relates to the overarching conceptual premise of the 16th East Wing  Biennial, and the wider canons of art history.

Brill writes, “In direct dialogue with Kennard’s functional works, on the adjoining wall Andrea Mindel’s delicately hand-stitched linen glows with a delicate urgency. The pearly white titular words You Make Me Sick (2025) juxtapose the softness of the fabric with a harsh and intensely emotional reality. With each precise stitch, Mindel imbues the material with an affective sense of urgency. Her practice echoes Judith Butler’s reframing of vulnerability not as weakness but rather as the ground of resistance.(3) By situating her critique within the domestic and the hand-made, Mindel radically implodes hierarchical binaries between public and private, destabilizing traditional notions of masculine and feminine. Her careful process is a form of emotional expression in every way. The antique fabric, reminiscent of a handkerchief, is a powerful symbol for grief. Subverting this, Mindel punctures the surface with her needle in a triumphantly angry act of reclamation and resistance. 

Exploding gendered binaries, the spellbinding elegance of Mindel’s plain statement testifies that protest operates as much through intimate acts of mourning and persistence as through mass mobilisation. “

The wall mounted description of my work overwhelmed me. It’s not often in my life as an artist that I’ve either felt understood or part of something bigger than myself. 

Brill writes again, “Andrea Mindel dramatically subverts the traditionally domestic or feminine craft of embroidery, transforming it into a vital and urgent site of critique.

The juxtaposition between the delicacy of the antique linen and the biting words embedded in it creates a shocking sense of bathos. Mindel wields her needle like a weapon as she literally punctures the surface of the past. Channelling this anger, this sense of ‘feminine rage’, the artist creates something truly beautiful. Resembling a handkerchief, itself a powerful symbol for grief, the very fabric of the work is vulnerable. To light, to its environment, to Mindel’s hand. This sense of precarity cements You Make Me Sick as both an expression of deep emotion and a radical act of resistance. 

In the context of RE:ACT, where artists explore the capacity of art to enact social change, Mindel’s work glows in quiet defiance.”

Open September 2025 - July 2027
For details on opening times, events, lectures, and the EWB Archive Project see: https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/eastwing-biennial/

(3)Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance, (Duke University Press, 2016) https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11vc78r.