The artist spins a horror tale about hormonal transformation
Humans have told many stories to make sense of hormonal transformations, among them tales of werewolves: metaphors for the beast within, carnality and adolescence. The red-hooded heroine of Angela Carter’s story ‘The Company of Wolves’ (1979) has ‘just started her woman’s bleeding’ when she sets out to visit grandma, but already knows ‘the worst wolves are hairy on the inside’.
In Lindsey Mendick’s immersive exhibition at London’s Cooke Latham Gallery, the hormonal lycanthrope becomes a cypher for the artist herself. Lifesize bipedal figures in cotton hospital gowns are seated along the jolly walls of a fantastical gynaecology and paediatrics unit. In place of human faces they sport wolf masks; hairy claws burst through their clunky rubber clogs. Heavy in glazed ceramic, these have the horror-comic vigour of Halloween props, though some feature acupuncture needles and, on the wolf faces, anxious expressions.
Arranged around a plastic play-table, Mr Potato Head and Sylvanian Families toys undergo a grim transformation: their surfaces carbuncled and breached by lupine snouts. These imperilled infants are Mendick’s potential offspring, and those of other women suffering polycystic ovary syndrome, which lowers ovulation (and thus fertility) and raises ‘male’ hormones, leading to weight-gain and excess body hair.
A film reduces Mendick to a mouth and chin, the offending body parts around which her wolf within – the alien hormones flooding her body – has pushed long dark hairs. Between clips from werewolf movies, including Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984), Mendick sips red wine and invites us to notice it catching on her lip hair. She shares horror stories. There are cruel adolescent encounters. There are also conflicting pressures: an adult world in which a woman is expected both to be a good feminist in accepting her body, and to mourn her lost fertility. Mendick wishes to do neither, and worries she’ll be judged superficial.
This is sticky, awkward, womanly stuff: prime territory for this artist, who has previously explored coercive control and the intersection of sexual fantasy and the domestic. Wit and sly referencing sweeten the pain, but Mendick’s use of myth and old stories reminds us, too, how cruel they are to women who can’t, or won’t, stick to the path.
Lindsey Mendick: Hairy on the Inside, Cooke Latham Gallery, London, 15 April – 21 May
