Hello, my name is Lindsey Mendick. I’m an artist based in Margate. I developed the idea for my installation with sex workers from the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement. SWARM is led by people who work in the sex industry in the UK, campaigning for their rights and safety. This art shows the realities of sex work and the workers’ stories and histories. We wanted to foreground the main reason that most people sell sex: to make a living or because they are unemployed or too low paid to survive on.
In my research and in speaking with sex workers, I found the same stories repeating again and again. Sex workers are still not being listened to. Laws meant to protect sex workers often don’t reflect the realities of their lives and what they need to work safely. In the UK – except for Northern Ireland – it’s legal to buy and sell sex, but advertising sex, soliciting, kerb-crawling and working indoors with friends are all criminalised. Being fined or spending time in prison makes it harder for people to leave sex work and find other jobs.
Stigma can also lead to sex workers facing discrimination when accessing healthcare and other services. Cities are always changing, and arrests of sex workers increase as an area becomes more gentrified. The police and media describe this as “cleaning up the streets”. This language is harmful and suggests that it’s OK to treat these people like dirt. Sex workers who work on the streets face a higher risk of violence than those who work indoors.
My installation takes the form of a church. I wanted to reclaim this sacred space to create a sanctuary for the stories and histories of sex workers. Can you see the different moneyboxes? Each one of them relates to a different issue, historical moment, person or organisation relating to sex work. Churches have played a key role in the history of sex workers’ activism.
In 13th-century Paris, sex workers organised and built their own chapel with Mary Magdalene as their patron saint. In 1917, in San Francisco, America, there was a plan to evict brothels, so hundreds of sex workers marched to a Methodist church to demonstrate against it. In June 1975, in Lyon, France, sex workers were fed up with their ‘inhumane’ working conditions, so 100 sex workers occupied the Saint-Nizier Church for eight days to draw attention. In November 1982, in London’s King’s Cross red-light district, sex workers were fed up with police brutality and racism. So the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied the Church of the Holy Cross to protest.
On the back wall of the church, where the central arched window would be, is a video projection of Mendez, a Jamaican-British author, performing a sermon. Mendez was raised within the Jehovah’s Witness faith and formerly worked as a sex worker, becoming estranged from both their church and their family. Their sermon addresses sex workers’ demands for better rights and safety. On either side of the central projection is a stained-glass window. The left window has three women. They are sex workers who became Christian saints, such as Mary of Egypt.
The right window is a mother nursing a child, wearing a mask. I chose this image because globally, most female sex workers are also mothers. And when sex workers protest, they wear masks to protect their identities. There is also a neon light that says “Workers Workers Workers” as an ode to the recognition that sex work is work.