Image Credit: Still from the film, ‘a sea change’ by zack mennell. Image by Baiba Sprance.

Self-taught artist zack mennell works across writing, analogue photography and performance to explore queerness, neurodiversity, presence and visibility. Rooted in the industrial landscapes of the Thames Estuary, their latest practice moves between folklore and fieldwork, ecological grief and strange, other-than-human embodiment.

Recent collaborations span DadaFest International, The Bluecoat, ArtsAdmin and Venice International Performance Art Week, reflecting a practice shaped by community as much as site.

This March, zack convenes COMMON HOST at Peckham’s Safehouses: a weekend gathering that reimagines ancient customs such as mumming within the post-industrial terrains of London and Essex. At its centre is para(site): a sea change, alongside contributions from artists Julia Bardsley, Selena Chandler, Leon Clowes, Nathalie Coste, Ewan Hindes, Ella Johnston, Fenia Kotsopoulou, Ash McNaughton, Andrea Mindel, Jo Morrison, Martin O’Brien, Pianka Parna, Manuel Vason and Chanel Vegas, plus a new short film created with Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi. “I’m not anxious about originality,” zack writes. “I am entranced by the entanglements that occur across relationships among people, places, ideas, and experiences”. COMMON HOST asks what we inherit – and crucially, what we leave behind – gathering artists and audiences in a shared reckoning with industrial residue, myth and survival. In this feature, zack walks us through their work, which you are invited to experience yourself from 13-15 March 2026.

a sea change is grounded in a smattering of visions, a visual language of the deep, murky and messy depths of my thinking. It germinated and mutated on from (para)site in 2022, when I was plagued by dreams of a puffy, bright-white humanoid creature submerging in a vast body of water. Bringing this apparition to the Deptford foreshore – I as It – covered in a bodysuit of adult diapers, walking into the river Thames at low tide should have sated the compulsion erupting within me. In that moment of immersion, I heard another call coming from downriver, from where the flow of water was pushing me.

On one of the many bends in England’s longest river sits the watery boundary of Thurrock, where I grew up.

Image Credit: Still from the film, ‘a sea change’ by zack mennell. Image by Baiba Sprance.

Thurrock is a convoluted landscape marked by swathes of housing developments, industrial works and docks, as well as scattered post-industrial sites that are now “reclaimed” by nature, providing habitat for scientifically and environmentally significant wildlife and plant life.

Being bound by the river, across its history and to this day, it has been a place of commerce – a landing and departure point for goods and people headed to and from the capital upriver. Thurrock, to me, is a place of brown sites turned green, where chalk quarries are populated with housing developments and wildlife parks. Amongst them, in former pits, are industrial estates, chemical plants, and retail parks – most notably Lakeside shopping centre.

There is the riverine scape and its sonic infringements, where flood warning sirens are tested amongst the whistles of the factories and docks, as well as the resounding blare of fog horns from larger ships being piloted through the river. Bracketing these locations inland is the constant roar of mechanical wind from the traffic on the M25 and A13. It is also home to the Thames high-voltage crossing, the tallest electricity pylons in the UK, a monument of some fascination to me.

Image Credit: Still from the film, ‘a sea change’ by zack mennell. Image by Baiba Sprance.

Considering themes of excavation, reclamation, displacement, and connectivity have been at the core of creating a sea change and the wider accompanying programme, COMMON HOST. My practice is concerned with ecological impacts and legacies of toxicity. Working in analogue photography, this is something to navigate and mitigate. As an artist entering professional practice in the context of climate breakdown, it is an urgent issue I find impossible to ignore. Working with the diaper suit requires a responsibility to reuse; so these beings continue to mutate over time, repaired and reconsidered. Working sustainably has encouraged me to work in site-responsive ways, foraging for materials such as litter from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries found across the Thames Foreshores, as well as biodegradable materials. The resourcefulness of foraging and conversing with a place has fostered a new connection and relation with the world.

I’m interested in fieldwork, not as a framework for measuring and extracting, but as a “process of making with”, something grounded in the decolonial approach of thinkers and artists found in 2022’s Fieldwork for Future Ecologies.

Image Credit: Still from the film, ‘a sea change’ by zack mennell. Image by Baiba Sprance.

Part of this “making with” is my desire to reframe the perception of the solo artist and individuality. COMMON HOST gathering the parasitic (un)natural brings together my artistic community around ideas of strange archetypes, inviting in odd beings and exploring practices such as mumming, situating these ancient folk customs in new relations to the post-industrial landscapes of London and Essex. This situates my practice and working within the ecology that it has emerged from and been built by.

Each of the artists in the programme has directly worked with me over the past two years to directly influence and inform the DNA of this work and likely all my works to follow. I do not believe ideas and art exist or emerge from a vacuum. I’m not anxious about originality; I am entranced by the entanglements that occur across relationships among people, places, ideas, and experiences. We each have a hand, however major or minor, in each other’s lives.

Image Credit: Still from the film, ‘a sea change’ by zack mennell. Image by Baiba Sprance.

Gathering the artists and works for COMMON HOST is opening a community to view and engagement from our interconnected and broader publics, and joining us to witness and interact with works that reflect a plurality of responses to folklore, environmental degradation, industrial legacy and cultural inheritance across mediums.

One of the issues facing humanity now, more than ever, is what we leave behind. In Thurrock, there are the toxic legacies of industry and centuries of landfill sites now eroding into the river and oozing unknown hazards into our already strained-to-the-limit waterways.

This project seeks to leave behind something more constructive, if anything. As the performers move through the exhibition space, traces of their actions will remain.

Once COMMON HOST is over, there will be no noticeable remnant of these works amongst the crumbled walls of the derelict Peckham Safehouses. But there is a hope that a relic or remnant will be ensconced in the minds of those who visit, a reminder that not all is lost yet, and that beyond the limits of our unceasing ingress on the environment, there are many things that will exist and thrive long after we are gone, only some of them made by our hands.

Find zack at zackmennell.com and @zackmennell

zack mennell
presents
COMMON HOST
gathering the parasitic (un)natural
Fri 13 – Sun 15 March, Safehouse, 1&2 139 Copeland Rd London SE15 3SN.

For more information visit futureritual.co.uk

Tickets from outsavvy.com