Margate's Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Where You End And I Begin, a solo exhibition by British artist Lindsey Mendick.
Open Wednesday - Sunday 12noon - 5pm
Preview - Saturday 27 June 2026, 6-8pm
Where You End and I Begin is an immersive exhibition exploring the blurred boundaries of intimacy, dependency, and identity through body horror, mythology, and ceramics.
The exhibition emerged from a moment of personal crisis for Lindsey Mendick. Travelling alone to New York after the pandemic, the artist experienced a panic attack brought on by the sudden absence of her partner and their dog, Telly. During the flight, the phrase “where you end and I begin” repeated endlessly in her mind, becoming the catalyst for a body of work centred on emotional entanglement, co-dependency, and the fear of separation.
Across the exhibition, Mendick combines elements of herself, her partner, and her dog into hybrid ceramic sculptures and installations. Acting as a contemporary Dr Frankenstein, she creates figures that are simultaneously tender, grotesque, humorous, and unsettling. Her interest in Frankenstein lies less in the novel itself than in the life of Mary Shelley, whose experiences of grief, obsession, and loss informed the story. For Mendick, Shelley is the real Dr Frankenstein, the one who wove this cautionary tale of memento mori from her own grief and obsession.
This tension between devotion and destruction runs throughout the exhibition. The works also draw on the wax anatomical models of Bologna’s medical museums, where educational displays often carried an unexpectedly erotic charge. Mendick echoes this tension between the clinical and the sensual, the vulnerable and the abject.
References to Plato’s Symposium further deepen the exhibition’s exploration of romantic attachment, particularly the myth that humans were once whole beings split in two and condemned to search eternally for their missing half. Mendick interrogates this seductive idea, asking what happens when closeness begins to dissolve individuality and intimacy becomes a form of confinement.
As a childless woman approaching forty, Mendick also frames her ceramic sculptures as surrogate offspring. Working with clay, she positions herself as a contemporary Prometheus, moulding figures that exist somewhere between self-portrait, companion, and child.
At its core, Where You End and I Begin examines the contradictory nature of love: its capacity to comfort, consume, sustain, and suffocate in equal measure.
Free Entry
Address
Lindsey Mendick - Where You End And I Begin
Carl Freedman Gallery, 28 Union Crescent, Margate
CT9 1NS
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