A Year of Living Dangerously

Artist Mandy El-Sayegh has received international acclaim for her multidimensional paintings, but a breakdown in 2020 pushed her in an entirely new direction

- Oliver Giles

It was in the spring of 2020 that Mandy El-Sayegh felt herself losing touch with reality. “I kind of had a nervous breakdown,” she says. “It was quite public.”

At the time, El-Sayegh was coming out of a turbulent six-year relationship and the Covid-19 virus was tearing across the UK. A national lockdown forced her to isolate in her studio, away from family and friends, and to retreat into her work. At first, she was thrilled at having so much time to focus on the sculptures, installations, videos and the fleshy, multilayered paintings that have made her one of the world’s most in-demand young artists. But as galleries and museums were closed, there was nowhere for her art to go. It accumulated in piles around her, filling every inch of her space. It was suffocating.

El-Sayegh veered wildly between a deep depression and manic anxiety. In crisis, she tried to find comfort in a new friend, who was dealing with her own trauma. “I ended up overly identifying with this stranger who was outside the studio and who lived in a caravan,” she says. El-Sayegh was initially unnerved by this mysterious woman, who parked her caravan on the street one night and stayed hidden inside for weeks. “She was a sex worker and also an artist. After months of being very paranoid about this presence because I didn’t know what she looked like, I saw her one night and she was a 26-year-old, very frail and beautiful person. We ended up making art together and going through a whole process of healing, until it got to a point where it wasn’t OK.” First, the stranger moved in to El-Sayegh’s studio and refused to leave. Then she stole El-Sayegh’s laptop. Finally, she began to physically threaten her.