Mandy Lee Jandrell is an artist whose work explores the shifting terrain between perception, environment and the construction of meaning.
Working across installation, moving image and photography, her practice is driven by a sustained investigation into how images and systems of looking construct, mediate and destabilise meaning. Jandrell’s projects often unfold as interconnected inquiries, unified by an attentiveness to transitional states—moments in which certainty falters, the familiar becomes uncanny, and the real begins to blur. A recurring concern throughout her practice is the instability of documentary conventions.
Jandrell frequently draws on the visual language of documentary photography—its clarity, neutrality and authority—while situating it within fabricated or choreographed environments. By doing so, she exposes how easily artifice can be naturalised and how globalised landscapes such as theme parks, botanical gardens and curated leisure sites package nature, culture and identity into consumable experiences. These constructed environments become spaces through which she examines agency, spectacle and the choreography of collective behaviour.
Her installations and films further probe the mechanics of perception. Using looping structures, fragmentation, mirrors and spatial layering, Jandrell complicates orientation and narrative, encouraging viewers to engage actively with the work rather than absorb it passively. The result is an encounter shaped by accumulation, interruption and spatial navigation—an experience that mirrors the unstable, uncanny conditions she investigates.
Mandy Lee Jandrell is a South African‑born artist. She began her formal art education at the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg, matriculating in 1993, and went on to complete a BA (Hons) in Fine Art with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 1998. During her studies, she was a member of the collaborative Sluice Group, contributing to large‑scale multimedia installations, including a major project at The Castle of Good Hope in 1996 and a subsequent installation commissioned for the Second Johannesburg Biennale at the South African National Gallery in 1997.
Jandrell has lived and worked in the UK since 1998. She completed an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2003, after which her lens‑based practice gained visibility through exhibitions in museums and galleries both in the UK and internationally. Her work was featured in the Whitechapel Gallery’s East End Academy in 2004 and was later commissioned by the Government Art Collection for display at 10 Downing Street.
Her solo and group exhibitions span the UK, Europe, the United States, South Africa and the Middle East, and her work has been reviewed in major art and news publications.