About

Tony Mentel is a Brighton-based artist working with needlework, embroidery, ceramics, monoprint, and mixed media. His practice uses crafts and applied arts long coded as feminine, forms marginalised in art history, kept at a distance from male authorship.

His work explores queer memory: unrecorded histories, lives never documented, identities shaped in private. Religious imagery appears throughout, but not as devotion, more as critique. The visual language of the Church, so often tied to shame and erasure of queer experiences, gets repurposed. Saints, devotional forms, and the language of the sacred become tools for telling queer stories within a tradition that spent centuries suppressing them.

He works with reclaimed fabrics and beads. The fabrics carry a kind of intimacy only used things have: worn close to a body, passed between generations, marked by time and people. Found objects, collected through time, are juxtaposed to the more decorative effects of his beadwork.

There’s a strong voyeuristic quality to his work. Figures are glimpsed rather than confronted, caught in moments that feel private, as though the viewer has walked in on something they shouldn’t be seeing. The richness of the surface adds to the feeling: the colour and texture, the patience in each stitch draw the eye in before the subject fully reveals itself, contributing to this feeling of silent notice.

Tony Mentel studied at the Royal College of Art and Liverpool John Moores University. He has exhibited across the UK and Europe. In 2024, he won First Prize at the Queer Britain Art Award.

info@tonymentel.com

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