(para)site, zack mennell, 2022. Image courtesy of Thames Festival Trust. Photo by Milo Robinson.
zack mennell (b. 1994) is a self-taught emerging artist using writing, photography, performance, and film to explore queerness and neurodiversity in relation to presence and visibility.
The first iteration of their ongoing project (para)site was commissioned by Thames Festival Trust and presented at VSSL studio in 2022 as part of Totally Thames Festival and Deptford X. The series has seen zack undertake psycho-geographic explorations of London’s waterways - scavenging for material residues of the city’s industrial past and offering strange performative interventions in ramshackle places. This body of work explores the resonances between zack’s experiences of madness and institutionalisation, the wider climate of political hostility to disabled, neurodivergent, queer and working class communities, and urban histories and ecologies.
Future Ritual will produce mennel’s forthcoming project (para)site: a sea change. involving performances in London (as artist-in-residence at Duckie), Liverpool (during DaDaFest International) and South Essex (during Estuary Festival).
As part of this project, zack is currently working on Rage Reactor, an installation and performance work which poetically entangles the traumatic legacy of the nuclear family with the trauma that the civil nuclear industry enacts on the land. Rage Reactor has been commissioned by DaDaFest International and will premiere at Bluecoat (Liverpool) in March 2025.
zack frequently collaborates with performance artist Martin O’Brien. Whistling as the Night Calls, a series of photographs exploring their long-term collaborative relationship with O’Brien, was exhibited by Future Ritual at VSSL Studio in Nov 2024. zack also often works in documenting performance and live events through photography using only analogue 35mm film.
zack often incorporates textual elements into their performances and also practices as a writer. Recently, their contribution to Dolly Sen's Birdsong From Inobservable Worlds, a commission supported by Unlimited and Wellcome Trust was published by Cuckoo’s Nest Books. Their work sal(i)vation was published in FDBN...MOURNING by Sticky Fingers Publishing. They were an invited contributor and cover artist for the Addiction Recovery Arts Network’s magazine Performing Recovery.
zack is a member of the Liberty Advisory Group, which provides collective oversight of Liberty, the Mayor of London’s flagship festival for D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists. They are a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, a member of the Metal New Artist Network, and the Working Class Creatives Database. They are also a member of TOMA (The Other MA) 2024/25 cohort, a professional artist development programme based in Southend-on-Sea. zack was granted an Arts Council England DYCP grant in November 2023, and has recently finished New Dialogues, a visual art creative research commission for the British Art Network and Outside In exploring archives of art created historically in mental health settings.
> (para)site: a sea change
> Whistling as the Night Calls: collaborative photographic works
> Whistling as the Night Calls (editions)
> www.zackmennell.com
zack is a member of the Liberty Advisory Group, which provides collective oversight of Liberty, the Mayor of London’s flagship festival for D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists. They are a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, a member of the Metal New Artist Network, and the Working Class Creatives Database. They are also a member of TOMA (The Other MA) 2024/25 cohort, a professional artist development programme based in Southend-on-Sea. zack was granted an Arts Council England DYCP grant in November 2023, and has recently finished New Dialogues, a visual art creative research commission for the British Art Network and Outside In exploring archives of art created historically in mental health settings.
> (para)site: a sea change
> Whistling as the Night Calls: collaborative photographic works
> Whistling as the Night Calls (editions)
> www.zackmennell.com
The decommissioned Bradwell nuclear power station, Essex. Photo by zack mennell, 2024.