Lindsey Mendick

I am put in mind of the words of horror writer Shirley Jackson, that ‘no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.’ Here, we are confronted with the unadulterated reality of women’s lives through various studies of shame, and how women are expected to live in a culturally conditioned shamed state. The pseudo-didactic sculptural gestures – a stripper pole, portraits and proclamations of ‘marked’ women captured in stained glass, a gallows pole, wallpaper depicting a scold’s bridle – square up to watchers in a way that skewers nuance and attacks the idea of a guilty pleasure; we don’t want to watch, but we aren’t able to look away. The truth of this is laid bare, a necessary directness.

I may be crazy, but that don’t make me wrong. – Martha P. Johnson

This critique of how we look at and what we commodify runs through the work like a dark, bloodied seam. Built on the recollection of visiting an underground house of horrors as a child, the Jack the Ripper experience at the London Dungeon, and being told that she should not be scared, for the exhibition ‘wasn’t real’, the hypocrisy in this statement, as a young girl, was recognised. The murders of women and endless repetition of cultural femicide becomes a tourist attraction (what else could it be?), a ghoulish and gory, televised conceit: as we are conditioned to gawp at the darkest tragedies of women’s lives, as entertainment, as pleasure, from witch trials to present-day court scenes, where a woman must face her abuser, is ridiculed for proving her abuse, who loses her worth for daring to have remained alive. And even when she’s dead, she becomes pure fiction: as 20-minute crime podcast, as HBO drama, as ditty, as bit.

What is this historical desire to punish? As with Saint Agatha, whose devotion to her faith and refusal of a man resulted in the amputation of her breasts, or Saint Lucy, who removed her own eyes in order to halt her forced marriage. Lindsey’s cartoonish and warped versions of these figures is a political repositioning of them. Oliver Twist’s eponymous anti-heroine Nancy is given a necessary spin-off, room to flesh out her story, the limitations imposed. ‘Off With Her Head’ is an education in women’s stories, but also our cultural responses to them. Justice is attempted to be done at every juncture to the women scorned, flogged and beaten down.

BLESS ME FATHER FOR I HAVE SINNED

For women’s hysteria is highlight-able. For she is manic, or insane. She is not allowed to create avenues into the unknown, or the extreme, for then she is too much, embarrassing, ill-fitting. And even if she’s not these things, she’s still not allowed to live. ‘Off With Her Head’ underpins the hypocrisy in us all. Lindsey turns this mirror back onto our gawping. The concept of entertainment is turned inside out, the desire we have to publicly isolate, shame and ridicule women is bulldozed. This idea is made to eat itself: Lindsey has created works so bombastic, so full of body, reference, and vision, she reclaims the idea of what it means to be watched. Sculptures of women burned at the stake, uncanny familiars in the shape of cats wearing ruffs, or bestial Pasiphaë being pleasured by a bull, or five severed breasts on a plate of rotting food. The show says, If you want to look so much, I am going to give you something to look at. The stories of women’s bodies are totally re-rendered, rage patiently becomes sculpture, which becomes rage again, the directness of the work belied by its deeply interrogative reference points; we are given a palate of women’s stories studied and lived, with a sense of justice for their treatment. The known horror of women’s lives is treated here with a bawdy and ludic, gothic sensibility, a living evocation of Selma James’s note that ‘we have to define ourselves by reclaiming the words that define us.’The play and otherworldly shape of this darkness in Lindsey’s work is a reclamation, and as such, an empowering.