Mendick's new exhibition turns love into body horror
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- Lindsey Mendick's solo exhibition 'Where You End and I Begin' opens with grainy Polaroids of her and partner, artist Guy Oliver, in extremely intimate poses — naked bodies writhing, tongues on nipples, toes in mouths — described in the review as "so full-frontal you feel like a voyeur for looking"
- Mendick layers religious and folkloric imagery into the relationship, depicting herself as the Virgin Mary on a vase with her black pug Telly as a surrogate baby Jesus, while Oliver's face screams from another vase sprouting horns like a faun or satyr
- Ceramic objects in the show include sex toys with organic uterine forms, two-handled toothbrushes, snails snogging, and Telly encased in guts like a prenatal baby; a final room of white pieces shows the couple's faces knitted into one form, sharing a rib cage and heart, displayed "as if in a medical laboratory"
- Wall panels pair images of seahorses, slugs, wombs and conjoined-twin skeletons with phrases including "I'm simultaneously sick of you and can't live without you," "I'm sure you'd be happier without me" and "Can you not see I'm drowning?" — capturing the toxic underside of the love story
- The reviewer compares Mendick to her friend and Margate neighbor Tracey Emin, arguing Mendick pushes Emin's emotional vulnerability into "Cronenbergian body horror and Prozac Nation millennial malaise"
- The critic concludes the show is "probably Mendick's best work to date," while noting that the vases' "slightly crude aesthetics" don't fully land
Why it matters: The reviewer declares this Mendick's best work to date and explicitly positions her as extending Tracey Emin's confessional-art lineage into Cronenbergian body horror, cementing Mendick's standing alongside Emin within the Margate scene and reframing emotional vulnerability as grotesque hybrid sculpture rather than pure confession.
