'My art has more pleasure in it now': How everything changed for three artists over lockdown

It’s a strange time to be an artist. Not only are they the ultimate freelancers, they’re also the people we turn to in tough times to try to make sense of a confusing world. But how do they make sense of it themselves?

I visited three London artists’ studios to find out: Adelaide Damoah is a performance artist whose exploratory work on colonialism couldn’t be more timely; Lindsey Mendick, recently nominated for the $100,000 Future Generation Art Prize, makes elaborate, witty installations in ceramic and other media exploring emotion and female sexuality; while James Capper is an award-winning sculptor and engineering visionary.

Adelaide Damoah

My exhibition at Boogie Wall gallery was supposed to open in April. Luckily for me the owner refused to give up. She said, we’re doing this. There are companies that do virtual exhibitions. I wasn’t really sure at the beginning because I haven’t experienced anything like that before. It’s still better in real life though, and now the show is up and you can see it in person.

During this time I did a lot of studying, I set up a couple of reading groups. Every Sunday we read. We started with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, now we’re on his The Dying Colonialism. It’s almost been like going back to university but studying something really interesting, and relevant to my practice as well.

There’s an ongoing strand of my work, the Confronting Colonisation project. But during lockdown I started doing some colourful stuff as a direct response. That is not about anything aside from pure joy a pure expression of fun; art for art’s sake. It has been really freeing. I’ll be in the studio until two o’clock in the morning, just enjoying myself, pigment everywhere. I don’t usually do that, there’s usually something quite heavy behind my work, and a lot of research. The coloniser project is my life’s work, but recently I’ve been working with new materials, just experimenting with them to see how they go and working with a lab to test their longevity. I’m not really allowed to talk about the materials specifically, but they are very, very relevant to [the project]. That’s all I can say! I’m also working on a new performance. I thought I wasn’t going to have to do one for a while, but it feels right after all this to mark the show’s end and also the beginning of this new journey, which is a continuation, but still something completely new.

Last year for me was crazy; I did something like 10 performances. By the end of February, I was finished. I have endometriosis, and I had a flare up. So I was sick for two or three weeks and then I started having symptoms [of coronavirus]. I had two friends going through the same thing, so we were checking on each other every day.

I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to my friends more than during this period. I feel a lot more connected. Last year, I was completely disconnected. My social life was my work life and my work life was my social life. Now, partnerships and collaborations for the future have started to be formed and I don’t know that they would have been, had we not been in this situation.

Adelaide Damoah: Reembodying the Real is at Boogie Wall Gallery, Mayfair. Her new performance, Revaluing the Self, is at the gallery on Friday at 7pm, boogie-wall.com

James Capper

Pre the whole pandemic situation, everything seemed to be going a thousand miles an hour. Definitely within my work, and with Mudskipper [a sculpture which takes the form of a boat that can walk on land], which was all very tense because of it being delayed by lots of things. Then just as I was getting all the paint ready to go over to paint Mudskipper, everything stopped and Scott, the guy over at the Royal Docks was like, the Marina is now closed — unless you actually live on a boat in there, no one can go in.

And so, I was back in the studio, doing bits, but then the steel dealers shut. And then, this crazy thing — the airplane trails in the sky stopped. To see the economy and the world stop is fascinating. When you’re under the cosh on these big projects, you’re like, what out there can save me from probably slipping a disc out of stress? What stops the wheel? And this then went and did that.

Obviously this is a really bad situation. People have died. But for me it has allowed me to reflect and to have ideas. No planes in the sky, and being surrounded by my research material, got me making a whole group of new drawings about hydrogen-powered aircraft that could also help in the dismantlement of offshore oil platforms.

I think that heavy speculation allowed me to stabilise. The mind can end up like a compactor, with everything crushed through different things — isolation is one, or losing a partner or losing my Mum [last year]. [But] for me drawing is quite therapeutic.

I also made these Rotary Drawings — Lucca Hue-Williams [of Albion Barn gallery] contacted me to ask if I had any drawings for an auction for the charity Covid Smart. I’d just tidied out a shipping container and found a machine I’d made called Hydrapainter which is a hydraulic painting machine. I made 101 of them with paint I was going to use for Mudskipper. We’ve sold 20 so far. The titles like “Thank you very much for that clear presentation” or “Stay alert” reference various power phrases used by the Culture Secretary in one of his daily briefings. Whoever wrote that, whether it was him or someone else, did a really good job — it was great for titles! Now I’m working on a mobile expedition studio, with an alternating tripod gait. My work is morphing a little bit more towards architecture. It’s going to be very comfortable inside!

James Capper’s Rotary Paintings for Covidsmart can be viewed at albionbarn.com

Lindsey Mendick

I’d been running on empty — I’d done a show at Space in Ilford, then Brussels, then Birmingham, and then straight into a show at Sarah Zanin Gallery in Rome. So my partner and I were in Rome, and he lost his passport, and we were just so tired, and tired of each other, and we sort of broke up. I was continuously horrible because I was mentally and physically exhausted. You think it’s your dream but in your dream you’d be paid better and you’d have more help! So I was ready for a break. And then it was just me and him, and we just remembered how much we loved and liked each other. And during lockdown, we got engaged.

It’s hard to describe anything to do with coronavirus without sounding like you don’t understand how terrible it is, but amazing things have come out of it for me. I’ve always been an incredibly anxious person so when it happened and everyone was as crazy as I was, I felt very calm. I really thought I’d use the time in a really incredible way and just… no. I think we just drank a lot of wine and pranced round the kitchen a lot.

I made work for an online exhibition at Cooke Latham Gallery in Battersea during this time and now I’m working on my forthcoming show at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art. It’s called Are You Going to Destroy Me, which is unfortunate after Michaela Coel’s series! That was the first thing that I said to my partner when I sat on his lap drunk and asked him to come home with me. I do think that relationships, when you fall in love, they do destroy you. They destroy the single person that you were, you become something else. So when I met him and then recently we got engaged, there was this thing about creating a vampiric love story about us getting together. The show is my first foray into painting. It’s trying to make these small monuments to moments that happened during this time. All the things we’ve been enjoying — sex or takeaway, those are life’s pleasures now there’s no East-Enders. Gail’s Bakery was a big thing for us. We felt such idiots, we’d go and get a proper coffee and it was like, this is the best thing ever. Or we did the big shop and that was the highlight of our week. I’m doing a lot of casts of wine bottles that we drank during this time, and these wedding vases, and in the middle of it there’s going to be a couple — me as the werewolf because I’m a hairy woman, and then him cradling me as the vampiric husband. I always think that gothic fairytales come from trying to take yourself out of a real narrative which is scary or hard to decipher, so within a global pandemic it was nice to be back together. I feel incredibly lucky, it makes me almost cry every time I think about it, and how into it he is, being my muse.

I think my work’s got a lot better; it has more pleasure in it now. I’m understanding how necessary it is to have humour. Recently I went round a couple of shows again and I was so much happier. I realised how much I had missed it. Being able to be a viewer again and realising why you create stuff is a lovely thing.

Are You Going to Destroy Me is part of SOLOS at Goldsmith’s CCA, New Cross, Sept 18-Dec 13