‘Hello, what’s your name?’ Horace Lindezey asks me as I pull out a seat at his table. ‘What year were you born?’ A slight fluster flashes over his face when I tell him 1992. ‘And what year was your mum born?’ My mum was born in 1957. ‘Ah, same as Dawn French,’ he smiles and nods. He asks how many pairs of glasses I own, when I wear them, where I do my work and where I live, and it seems to me Lindezey is rifling through the giant network of connections in his head, checking catalogue entries and seeing which ones my answers bump to the surface for him to draw out.
Spread across the table in front of us are some of Lindezey’s artworks. A multidisciplinary artist with a focus on ceramics and textiles, the pieces include stamped dinner plates, wedding favours of little wooden counters that look like Love Hearts sweets, framed prints, champagne flutes and a silver sculpture of a lion. Katherine Long, Head of Creative Development at Venture Arts has been repackaging them after hastily deinstalling Lindezey’s first solo exhibition a few weeks ago. We Are Gathered Here Together was shown in Blackburn Cathedral Annex as part of this year’s The National Festival of Making, the outcome of an Art in Manufacturing residency. This commissioning strand of the festival places artists in factories and with manufacturers, as part of which Lindezey spent one day a week at The Making Rooms in Blackburn between February and July, developing new works with digital technologies. He spends most of the rest of his time at Venture Arts, a long running studio supporting learning disabled artists in Manchester, where he’s been a member for over thirty years. Over the course of the residency he had support from Caroline Tattersall, one of Venture Arts’ ceramics facilitators, and Kim Stuttard, Creative Alliance Associate at The Making Rooms.
We Are Gathered Here Together focused on three of the life events and special occasions so important to Lindezey: births, deaths and, as the title indicates, weddings. Most of the works in front of us right now are from this latter section of the show, with which Lindezey added installation to his repertoire. A huge wedding breakfast table was set for twenty-four, dressed in sage green and salmon pink – referencing the colours from Lindezey’s brother Steve’s wedding in 2018, the most recent one he’s attended – and decorated with the Love Heart wedding favours and small ceramic flowers.
Lindezey’s enduring obsession with weddings started when he was a teenager, after attending his first one aged fourteen in 1980. ‘My cousin Sylvia’s one,’ he smiles and nods slowly, remembering, ‘I enjoyed that one.’ It becomes clear that he comes from a huge family, generating ample invitations. ‘Cheryl got married in ’81 in Ipswich. All the family was there,’ he recalls, ‘Sonia and my cousin was there, and my dad came down in the car.’ Lindezey can list every subsequent year, recalling how many weddings there were, whose it was, where it was, which suit he wore and, all importantly, whether there was cake. The special occasion of a wedding seems to bring together all these things he loves – travelling and staying over somewhere new, meeting people and chatting to them, getting dressed up and celebrating. ‘1999 I was at a wedding in Boston. It was my cousin Rennie that married Stephanie. Me and my mum was down there. She bought me that green suit with the handkerchief. She bought it in Manchester, with the white shirt and a tie, and I worn it out there for the wedding.’ I learn that the preparations are just as important as the wedding itself, and Lindezey will sometimes get up at 4am on a special occasion day to iron his chosen suit and get ready for the event.
But TV weddings are just as important as family ones in Lindezey’s memory network of dates, names and stories. ‘East Enders, the old time ones,’ he responds without missing a beat when I ask which are his favourite, ‘and Coronation Street ones. And Terry McCann’s wedding. On Minder.’ And the list goes on – exhibited alongside the wedding breakfast table was a series of commemorative plates – created as a stencil print and then made into ceramic transfers, all celebrating TV weddings including Rodney and Cassandra Trotter on Only Fools and Horses in 1989 and Barbie and Bill Reynolds on Love Thy Neighbour in 1972. It seems that these characters, along with other public figures and artists, are just as important to Lindezey as the people in his life, and the stars of his wedding table installation are undoubtedly Kylie and Jason in their iconic 1987 Neighbours wedding. The charming backstory to this begins with Elena Jackson, now Director of The National Festival of Making, as a seven year old child so fascinated by the frothy glamour of that wedding that she got The Neighbours Wedding Collection on VHS. Having met and worked with Lindezey during the 2023 festival’s group show, YESS LAD, she knew about his love of weddings and collection of video tapes. Lindezey has created work relating to Kylie and Jason over the years, and spoke about them a lot at the start of this residency, so Elena dug out the tape which she knew would compliment the show. Along with other characters like Rudolph Walker and Mona Hammond from the early 2000s sitcom The Crouches, they have their own embroidered wedding chair sashes (‘Kylie had lipstick on’, one reads) and names engraved on champagne flutes, but Kylie and Jason also occupy pride of place atop the three tier cake Lindezey made for the occasion. ‘It’s a special ceramic,’ he tells me, ‘porcelain,’ with the two little characters embracing in a ring of roses. ‘It’s a nice cake,’ he assures me, and I couldn’t agree more. Lindezey loves cake, but because of his diabetes he’s only allowed it on special occasions. ‘That cake did surprise me,’ he says, reminiscing about the fruitcake that Tattersall baked in secret for the exhibition opening, of which Lindezey ate six slices while telling everyone he’d only had one. Long jokily chides him but he spreads his hands indignantly – ‘and what happened?’ he probes.
‘I learned about those things with Miss Stuttard at The Making Rooms,’ he tells me as I pick up one of the Love Heart wedding favours. Cut into their faces, which are painted white, rose pink and duck egg blue, are handwritten messages – quips that Lindezey is known to repeat – enclosed by love heart shapes. ‘She put it in there and she closed it,’ he says, miming bringing down a lid from overhead, ‘so it’s printing it. It’s a laser.’ One reads, Because you don’t eat fruit cake – a cheeky reminder to everyone else that they shouldn’t bother trying the cake because they won’t like it, thus leaving more for Lindezey to savour. Another checker reads Tears and water which opens up stories – one about getting upset over staying out in the dark and another about a storyline on something called The Champion, which Lindezey describes. ‘The man gone near where the tigers are, the lions are. But he’s not to go in there with those, because he might get eaten.’ Suddenly pensive, he adds quietly, ‘Luca’s not allowed to go in there.’ The way he brings Long’s son into the conversation is characteristic of how his great big network of connections doesn’t seem to have any hierarchy – friends and family and characters and celebrities are all equal.
One figure who is omnipresent in our conversation, though, is Lindezey’s mother. Until she passed away in 2007 they did almost all their travelling together, and her voice is present in the dinner table installation through some of the written messages. you don’t want to get food on your best clothes, reads the silver embroidery across the neatly folded napkins. you ate it all up, and, my mum told me not to ask for seconds, are two of the messages stamped across the white dinner plates in light green. ‘I’ve got my own font,’ Lindezey replies when I ask if it is his handwriting. Because his work so often includes verbal messages like these, a few years ago at Venture Arts they produced a typeface based on his handwriting, so he has it available for printing and stamping, and this year was able to use it at The Making Rooms for laser cutting, etching and digital embroidery. Lindezey’s previous textile work is also inspired by his mum, who would make bridesmaid dresses for friends and family by hand. We Are Gathered Here Together included some of his own hand embroidery – sparkling portraits of famous couples on their wedding days, with metallic threads and shiny beads and sequins.
Another other enduring obsession of Lindezey’s that crops up in many of his artworks is music. As well as video tapes, he collects cassette tapes and records. The beloved record player that his mum bought in 1981 might be the reason his knowledge of music from the 70s and 80s is so vast. Modern music, though, he’s not such a fan of. ‘Not CDs,’ he tells me firmly. ‘Throw that in the bin. We don’t talk about CDs.’ It suddenly makes sense to me why Lindezey looked a little put out when I gave him my birth year when we first met earlier. The reason he asked was to give me back a song from then. This is a routine for Lindezey when meeting new people, and it fed into the work on show in Blackburn. On the table in front of us are some of his ‘records’ screen and stencil prints that were included in the birthdays section of the exhibition. Resembling the presentation of framed records, each one includes the black circle of the record itself with a little image relevant to the artist or song (Suzi Quatro is pictured with her bass, for example), and, below, a little mustard-coloured rectangular certificate naming the title, artist, birth year and name of the person the print is for, sometimes along with Lindezey’s connection to that person. Steve Graham, for example, who was born in 1981 gets ‘Sat in Your Lap’ by Kate Bush. Lindezey also created a wallpaper for the exhibition space that included the names of more people and songs he’s chosen for their birth years. Festival Director Jackson gets ‘Baggy Trousers’ by Madness for 1980, and Terry Williams gets ‘Blue Velvet’ by Bobby Vinton for 1963.
These gestures of celebration and remembrance are also key to Lindezey’s most well-known artworks, the blue plaques, which have been shown on multiple occasions prior to The National Festival of Making, including in the group show YESS LAD at TJ Boulting in 2022, and in The Departed at The Gallery of Everything in 2023. Just like in his other work and in his storytelling, here celebrity, family and friends are mixed together with equal importance. Along with their birth and death dates below their names, each has a little message about who they were. There are plaques for public figures like Prince Philip (‘he wore a top hat and suit’), TV actors like Bill Treacher from Eastenders (‘Arthur made Pauline cry because he was with another woman. I don’t want to say too much. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble’), artists like Julee Cruise (‘She lived a life that was pleasing. She was my musician. She sang falling’) and one for Lindezey’s own mother (Emerald Lindezey 1938- 2007 She lived a life that was good. She taught me to iron. She had me baptised in the church. She was my mummy.). These works have proven popular – Lindezey has so far sold twenty-nine of them, including Margaret Thatcher, The Queen, Terry Nutkins and Tina Turner, eight of which have been acquired by curator Gemma Rolls Bentley for a new hotel and diner called Mollie’s Motel, which is due to open on the old site of Granada Studios in Manchester in summer 2025, alongside works by other artists based in the city. I love the idea that each time someone buys a blue plaque it makes Lindezey’s personal network that bit wider. With the money he’s made recently he’s been able to buy a new bicycle. ‘Did you see the bike?’ he asks Long, ‘it’s a black one.’ In recent years he was also able to buy a new record player, after the one his mum bought stopped working, along with some more records to play on it. ‘I have to go home soon,’ Lindezey says seriously, as it approaches the end of the day at Venture Arts. Bringing our conversation to a close, it’s clear to me that talking about his memories is a part of his practice just as important as working with clay or sewing on sequins. His joyful art plays out through all these different modes to welcome in a host of people, and We Are Gathered Here Together made the great big network of connections even bigger – I learn that the Love Heart wedding favours were produced in such quantity because they were intended for guests to take away. Long shows me some delightful photos sent in by visitors to the show, with Lindezey’s sculptures taking pride of place on walls, in frames and shared on Instagram stories. I’m a bit envious of the people who got to go attend the party of his wedding installation, but I know that Lindezey wants to tour this work – in a church is his dream – so I’m hopeful for the next iteration. When I leave I’m even allowed to take some Love Heart wedding favours home and, to borrow one of Lindezey’s own phrases, ‘I feel happy with that,’ very happy indeed.
We Are Gathered Here Together was on show as part of the National Festival of Making, Blackburn on 6-7 July 2024
Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester.
This interview is supported by Venture Arts.
Published 29.08.2024 by Lauren Velvick in Interviews
2,425 words