Lindsey Mendick, Where You End And I Begin

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Where You End And I Begin, a solo exhibition by British artist Lindsey Mendick. When You End and I Begin is an immersive exhibition detailing the suffocating intimacy of codependent relationships through the lens of body horror and classical mythology. The exhibition originated from a moment of crisis. After the pandemic, Mendick boarded a flight to New York alone and was suddenly confronted by how little she did without her partner and their dog, Telly, by her side. Mid-flight, she experienced a severe panic attack, the phrase “where you end and I begin” winding relentlessly through her mind—a question without answer, a boundary dissolved. Acting as a contemporary Dr. Frankenstein, Mendick splices herself, her partner, and her dog together in ceramic sculptures and installation. Her interest in Frankenstein stems not from the novel itself, but from the life of Mary Shelley—a woman who kept her husband’s heart for thirty years, who turned to the impossible as each of her children died young. Mendick sees Shelley as the real Dr. Frankenstein, the one who wove this cautionary tale of memento mori from her own grief and obsession. The exhibition’s aesthetic draws from the Bologna wax medical museums, where strangely sexualized anatomical models were created ostensibly for education but became sites of titillation. Mendick’s sculptures echo this unsettling fusion of the clinical and the erotic, the vulnerable and the grotesque. The work also engages with Plato’s Symposium and its theory that humans were once whole beings, now split and eternally searching for their other half. Mendick interrogates this romantic notion, asking what happens when that search becomes entrapment, when union becomes erasure. As a childless woman nearing forty, Mendick positions her ceramic creations as her offspring, casting herself as Prometheus—the mythological figure who fashioned all living beings from clay. Her sculptures become both children and self-portraits, acts of creation born from longing and constraint. Fundamentally, When You End and I Begin is about a woman feeling trapped in a relationship, uncertain whether she can sever ties that simultaneously smother and sustain her. It is an exhibition about love as both refuge and prison, about the terror of losing oneself and the equal terror of being alone.