I am looking at Lottie’s paintings and I am thinking about playing Ultima VII on my Super Nintendo. In Ultima VII, you could bake bread. You could shear sheep, spin wool, weave cloth. You could also dismember bodies, though this was not advertised as a feature. The bodies would separate into parts: torso, limbs, head. Each part was an object. Each object had weight. You could carry these parts in your inventory if you wanted, though I can’t remember why.
You could bake bread and you could carry limbs in your rucksack. The game made no moral distinction between bread and body parts. Lottie’s paintings also refuse to differentiate between the edible and the dead.
Her world is one where everything is divisible, collectible, arrangeable in containers that shouldn’t hold what they hold.
I think of another childhood game. At Halloween parties, adults would blindfold us and guide our hands into bowls. Eyes are grapes, intestines spaghetti. You know this. You reach in anyway. With Lottie’s work, the metaphor reverses.
A medical kit that is also a toybox. Or perhaps a toybox that is also a medical kit. The distinction matters. Items are arranged carefully: pink forms (the memory of flesh? a dream of spam?) rest against architectural fragments in boxes that breathe far too heavily. Mediaeval demons rendered in the palette of a Korean skincare ad. Everything wrong in the specific way everything is actually wrong.
An exhibition is a system. Lottie’s system operates like a body turned inside out, then carefully organised. A Victorian specimen collector would arrange items this way.
Looking through Lottie’s work, I count the ways things can go wrong. Flesh that thinks it’s architecture. Architecture that behaves like flesh. Sacred geometries filled with meat. Each work reads like a site report from an excavation that went through the body instead of around it. Each piece presents a different failure of category, yet together they form a system of incoherence.
Dismember My Monster. Present tense. Active voice. An instruction or request. But the dismemberment has already taken place. These paintings are the inventory after the act. They document what was found inside.
The colours come from specific places. That pink: Pepto-Bismol, strawberry medicine, the inside of a mouth. That green: hospital scrubs, underground bathroom light. The yellow of police tape or jaundiced eyes. Colours meant to warn or indicate malfunction. They shouldn’t harmonise but they do, like a headache that becomes pleasant over time.
The paintings operate as jokes, with punchlines replaced by surgical instruments. You’re waiting for resolution, for the moment when strange anatomy clarifies into symbol or metaphor. Instead, something keeps slipping between recognition and revulsion. The child who drew this knew exactly what they were doing, or they knew nothing at all. Both possibilities are equally disturbing.
The work coheres through accumulation. One painting might be a curiosity. Twenty becomes a world with its own weather system.
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Dismember My Monster
Lottie Stoddart
67 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PT
11 November - 16 November 2025
Gallery Hours: Mon - Sat 11am - 7pm | Sun 11am - 4pm
