Carl Freedman Gallery

30/08/2026

🎨 Laura Footes, Emii Alrai, Lindsey Mendick and Tracey Emin have new works in powerful new group exhibition now open in Margate.

30/08/2026

Last chance today! Final day to visit Lindsey Mendick’s solo show which closes today 🎨🌟 Open 12-5pm, Sunday.

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Where You End And I Begin, a solo exhibition by British artist LINDSEY MENDICK.

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.

Final day today, Sunday 30th August 2026

29/08/2026

Last two days to visit Lindsey Mendick’s solo show which closes on Sunday 🎨🌟 Open all weekend, 12-5pm Saturday and Sunday

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Where You End And I Begin, a solo exhibition by British artist LINDSEY MENDICK.

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.

Runs until 30 August 2026

28/08/2026

26/08/2026

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to announce Lures, a solo exhibition by Scottish‑Iraqi artist Emii Alrai.

27 September – 8 November 2026
Preview: Saturday 26 September 2026, 5-7 pm

Lures unfolds as a sculptural landscape shaped by excavation, myth and inherited memory. Alrai transforms the gallery into a shifting terrain, where fragments appear caught between ruin and reconstruction. Drawing on the aesthetics of archaeology and museology, her installations consider how objects become vessels for power, belief and cultural inheritance.

The exhibition centres on the idea of the “lure”: an object that attracts, deceives or promises access to something beyond reach. Through vessels, architectural forms and sculptural interventions, Alrai explores the relationship between desire, geography and the body. Across the gallery, clay, steel and carved polystyrene form a landscape of partial monuments, reliquaries and speculative artefacts. Sculptures resembling unearthed vessels, carved landscapes and provisional structures operate as decoys, suggesting authenticity while revealing their constructed nature.

Running throughout the exhibition is a tension between romance and violence, explored through heart burial, a practice particularly prevalent during the Crusades. Reserved largely for royalty, nobles and high-ranking figures, it involved the hearts of crusaders being preserved and returned from the Holy Land or elsewhere in Europe for burial at home, while others sent their hearts onwards to Jerusalem when unable to complete the journey themselves. These movements created a network of human remains crossing geographical and spiritual borders. Alrai is drawn to the allegorical charge of the heart as the imagined centre of desire and longing, physically attached to a desired place and forging connections to land through memory and devotion. Some vessel forms draw on Alrai’s research into the ornate containers used to house buried hearts, elevating human remains through ornamentation and care.

Together, these elements create an environment where the past feels both present and fabricated, in which myth, memory and material evidence continually blur.

26/08/2026

Emii Alrai
Lures

27 September – 8 November 2026
Preview: Saturday 26 September 2026, 5-7 pm

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Lures, a solo exhibition by Scottish‑Iraqi artist Emii Alrai.

Lures unfolds as a sculptural landscape shaped by excavation, myth and inherited memory. Alrai transforms the gallery into a shifting terrain, where fragments appear caught between ruin and reconstruction. Drawing on the aesthetics of archaeology and museology, her installations consider how objects become vessels for power, belief and cultural inheritance.

The exhibition centres on the idea of the “lure”: an object that attracts, deceives or promises access to something beyond reach. Through vessels, architectural forms and sculptural interventions, Alrai explores the relationship between desire, geography and the body. Across the gallery, clay, steel and carved polystyrene form a landscape of partial monuments, reliquaries and speculative artefacts. Sculptures resembling unearthed vessels, carved landscapes and provisional structures operate as decoys, suggesting authenticity while revealing their constructed nature.

Running throughout the exhibition is a tension between romance and violence, explored through heart burial, a practice particularly prevalent during the Crusades. Reserved largely for royalty, nobles and high-ranking figures, it involved the hearts of crusaders being preserved and returned from the Holy Land or elsewhere in Europe for burial at home, while others sent their hearts onwards to Jerusalem when unable to complete the journey themselves. These movements created a network of human remains crossing geographical and spiritual borders. Alrai is drawn to the allegorical charge of the heart as the imagined centre of desire and longing, physically attached to a desired place and forging connections to land through memory and devotion. Some vessel forms draw on Alrai’s research into the ornate containers used to house buried hearts, elevating human remains through ornamentation and care.

Together, these elements create an environment where the past feels both present and fabricated, in which myth, memory and material evidence continually blur.

21/08/2026

Lindsey Mendick
Holding on for too long, 2026
Glazed ceramic
Right Foot: 23 x 11 x 27 cm (9 x 4.5 x 10.5 in)
Left Foot: 25 x 13 x 27 cm (10 x 5 x 10.5 in)

19/08/2026

🎨🌟 Lindsey Mendick solo show runs until 30th August, 12-5pm Wednesday - Sunday

★★★★☆ “Probably Mendick’s best work to date.” — The Guardian
“Grotesque, humorous, deeply personal.” — Frieze

Carl Freedman Gallery is proud to present Where You End And I Begin, a solo exhibition by British artist LINDSEY MENDICK.

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.

17/08/2026

✨🪱 New Acquisition 🪱✨ Contemporary Art Society

We are excited to announce that ‘No worries if not’ (2024) by Lindsey Mendick has been purchased by the Contemporary Art Society, with support from the Arts Council of England / V&A Purchase Grant fund, and presented to Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich (Sainsbury Centre | Art Museum)

works predominantly in clay, utilising the material to explore her own personal history, and wider connotations around ‘low culture’, domesticity and the female experience, alongside anxiety and substance use.

In 2024, Mendick was invited to respond to the Sainsbury Centre’s collection as part of our ‘Why Do We Take Drugs?’ Season: a radical approach to programming which focuses on how art can help us navigate some of the biggest questions we have in our lives. Titled ‘Hot Mess’, Mendick created works which were located across the Sainsbury Centre’s iconic Living Area. ‘No Worries if not’ was included, where the artist explores her intertwined relationship with alcohol, mental illness and antidepressants. Through mythology, pathos and humour, she unpacks her (at times) debilitating anxiety and the ways in which society has learned to self-medicate by taking drugs and drinking socially. Mendick describes the work as her most personal to date: ‘This is a self-portrait of how I am now, with the desperation to join the party and to get drunk, and the utter shame and self-loathing when I’ve lost my inhibitions and let myself go. I want the work to show the desperate attempts at trying to piece myself back together.’

Inspired by the work of Francis Bacon, particularly his screaming mouths, the bust represents how Mendick feels during bouts of anxiety when she has the urge to tear off her own skin. Bacon’s work is one of the highlights of the Sainsbury Centre’s collection, with this piece now on permanent display next to Bacon’s 1955 painting ‘Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII)’.

© Lindsey Mendick. Courtesy the artist and Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. Photography Kate Wolstenholme. Image credit: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich

15/08/2026

📰🎨 Lindsey Mendick will be in conversation today at 4pm for a live recording of podcast with Deborah Frances-White.

Lindsey Mendick, and Quench gallery which she co-founded, are also featured in a new article about the Margate art community in the September issue of House & Garden Magazine, out now at all good newsstands.

✍🏻 Article by Fiona McKenzie Johnston and photos by Joshua Monaghan.