The scene outside is balmy. Sunshine flickers through a carefully managed, peaceful garden of flowers and grasses, framed by a wall and two moments of architecture. A formal small red rendered building is centred on the axis formed by a pond, while to one side is a dovecot. Nothing could be calmer, a peaceful and gloriously sunny morning at Jupiter Artland, in the ground of Bonnington House a short drive outside of Edinburgh. A noise from the dovecot draws attention to an open door in its circular shell.



Inside, the peace not just broken, but smashed into unrecognisable fractures. In the darkness of the interior, scattered cigarette butts and mangled cans seem to litter where doves once nested. A film from a TV brings light into the space, but along with it drunken chaos. The film playing a group of friends drinking and laughing as a blue-haired woman sings karaoke with no shortage of enthusiasm, throwing her body around the interior of the small bar they are all in, resplendent in glitter-ball reflections. They drink more, then go to a flat where the booze continues, right through until the embers of the day when an unknown Christmas drink has been dug out from the back of a cupboard, providing just enough fuel for the party to continue one more stuttering moment.

The blue-haired protagonist is Lindsey Mendick, the film just one part of a collection of disparate artistic elements that make the whole, SH*T FACED, an exhibition which forms part of this year’s Edinburgh Arts Festival (see 00124). The film careers between joyous fun and troughs of self-reflective lows, the impact of heavy social alcohol use can have on the self and a relationship – in this case that with her partner and collaborator Guy Oliver – which is explored in the morning-after section of the film’s dramaturgical rollercoaster.



The neighbouring red building is also full of fracture and a feeling of falling apart, albeit presented within an entirely grander interior than that of the dove’s former home. The rococo foliage ceiling of Jupiter Artland’s ballroom floats above a long dinner party set-piece in front of formal mirror-glass arches. But here, just as with Mendick’s diaristic film, there is damage. In places, the mirror is cracked, fracturing the reflection of a series of ceramic vases, objects which similarly present an uncanny grotesque twist on the surrounding neo-baroque architecture.

The scene is like a twisted last supper, each vase carrying a reminiscence of a character, but with parts of their profile missing. Only a chin and an ear remains of a smoker’s head, though the ruff and upper class garb remains. A heavily corseted bodice has completely lost its head. A buxom lady has managed to retain her nose, mouth, chin, and part of a forehead, but unfortunately has a serpent wrapped where there was once a brain. Thinking back to the crumpled tins in the dovecote, they also had an animalistic quality, squid-like tentacles flailing out from within. The cans and cigarette butts in the dovecote were made of ceramic, just as the series of destroyed lives in the more formal space were, a material Mendick has used regularly in a career which has rapidly developed since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2017.



Based in Margate, where she and Glover started Quench Gallery, the artist also curated this year’s annual Jupiter Rising festival, a free event of music, DJs, dancing, and – no doubt – much of the alcohol which underpins the freedom, fun, fear, and loathing in SH*T FACED. The artist references Robert Louis Stevenson’s text Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde as a founding ingredient of this project, invoking a two-faced personality which mirrors the differing versions of self that binge drinking can bring about. There is play, and joy, within the works, but also a terror and monstrous unnerving.

The final building which completes the mix of installations making up the totality of the project is Jupiter Artland’s gallery space. Here, dance music pulls the visitor into the dark space. Inside is an Alice In Wonderland space of shifting scale, logic, and geometry. Under another glitter ball, a tiny ceramic model of a nightclub portrays an eclectic and chaotic scene of indulgence and carnage. Tiny characters are checking in their coats, others queue at the bar to get more booze, people sit at tables chatting, there’s a game of pool taking place, some are gyrating at the central dance floor. But things get weirder. Some of the people have animal heads, there are humanoid-pigs fucking on the tiled floor, a centaur is in the middle of a bar brawl with smashed furniture, and all the while monsters are eating from the open guts of other punters. It’s a Boschian smorgasbord of the pleasures and pains of alcohol.



In the room beyond, a drunken toilet scene is manifested through distorted wall patterns. Everything becomes uneven and uncertain, and while the ballroom scene showed excess and debauchery is not a new thing, this is a modern and somewhat recognisable scene – but again, monsters, demons, and animals have taken hold.

A dropped handbag spills a burger, while another has transformed into a crab and is scuttling away. A pair of abandoned boots peppered with butts appear to have tentacles growing from within. Urinals are growing scrota. Fungi are growing up surfaces. A snake has condom wrappers stuck to its skin. And a female – perhaps Mendick herself – is gasping for air while struggling out of a toilet bowl, surrounded by bottles.



All in all, this is a disturbing and unnerving journey through Mendick’s self-reflection, but what is also a psychological look at a wider societal relationship with drink – one which is not new but seemingly hardwired into much identity. It is not judgemental, depicting clear pleasure and exultation, but also the morning after’s guilt, remorse, and physical and mental collapse.

It’s all the more powerful because of how it is spread across the different architectures and sites of Jupiter Artland. The dovecot is a space of intense dark compression, suiting the narrative arc of the film. The interior of the ballroom informs the historical decadence of the dinner party characters, using the neo-baroque to play with distortion and excess. And the last part of the journey presents a miniaturised model in which we can see an entire drunken world, before shifting our senses one final time to throw us into the tripping bathroom scene. Altogether it is a reflection of a world familiar to many, and while what we see is not pleasant, it is at times beautiful – even in its moments of macabre.