Lottie Stoddart takes the “paper-box stage” as her structural prototype, incorporating body, myth and everyday objects into a controlled, enclosed space. Through a process of “building the model first, then translating it into painting,” she compresses three-dimensional material experience into a two-dimensional psychological apparatus. From my perspective, the exhibition intends to use fragmented imagery to stage self-integration, and to engage a process analogous to individuation, in which shadow, conflict and fracture into something that can be seen, contained and ordered. Her work, in my reading, proposes a method for living within contemporary fragmentation: she transforms her own self layer by layer, using the containment of images to reorganise psyche and meaning as the audience felt, intensely, that she was performing her own individuation. I seemed drawn into an alchemical trial of the mind.
From my own perspective, they are an unconscious process of self-integration that the artist undertakes. This process of self-integration unfolds in countless details, but it can be understood through four stages: disassembly, containment, reconfiguration, and integration.
Drawing from medieval sources, Stoddart works within a symbolic system of allegory, faith, morality and the body. This is like the first step of human individuation — finding personal consciousness within collective norms, peeling away outer shells to search for what is real. In After the fact (2025), she said she wanted to make “her own mythological version.” She is indeed constructing a mythology for her inner structure. If the unicorn in Christian art symbolised purity, her version replaces it with “a beheaded dragon and a dead warrior.” She translates purity into a state of fragmented, contradictory selfhood.
In It’s Come to This (2025), she emphasises the confrontation between red and green — “opposite each other on the colour spectrum,” a “diagonal tension” across the picture plane — yet “no winner.” Fire and nature, man and beast, reason and desire, civilisation and the primal — all coexist. The conflict itself becomes the process of the soul’s evolution: continually adapting, purifying experience, transforming trauma into a more coherent personal will. These tensions don’t disappear; they remain and coexist.
There are also moments of grotesque humour. She mentions the “dismembered monster,” with its intestines, organs and severed limbs — “I wanted to use humour to disguise horror,” she says, “so I called it Egg Salad.” This is a remarkably mature psychological mechanism: humour creates distance, allowing violence to be seen. Sometimes, the act of seeing itself is a form of healing.
Stoddart builds psychological space through the logic of classical painting. Still life, in her hands, becomes a stage for emotion. The “boxes” are not merely formal devices; they map different strata of consciousness. She references Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias — her favourite manuscript — noting that her depiction of the Antichrist comes directly from it. Hildegard, a twelfth-century German mystic nun, oversaw Scivias as a “visual revelation of the soul.” By citing this source, Stoddart is rewriting the language of religion: transforming faith into psychological symbol, placing the sacred and the demonic together inside the same box.
Downstairs, the series follows a cyclical structure , with eight paintings titled like a journey: Entry ? Flaming Fields ? Lonely Mountains ? The Belly of the Beast ? The Boneyard ? The other Boneyard ? Food for worms ? Sly Escape. Stoddart herself has said: “Like Dante’s Inferno or the labours of Hercules — a sequence of psychological trials.” The intention is clear: the entire body of work forms a complete cycle of individuation — entering, confronting, breaking apart, reorganising, escaping — something like a DNA spiral, moving upward through repeated transformation.
Stoddart’s “boxes” operate as psychological metaphors — spiritual containers. Each painting poses the same fundamental question: After disintegration, how does one rebuild the self? She doesn’t offer an answer, but invites viewers to inhabit that unstable balance themselves — where chaos is structured but still alive; where fear is wrapped in humour yet remains palpable. Like life itself, her works are full of uncertainty, shaped by external forces. In such conditions, how can we locate the self? How do we internalise strength and awaken the soul?
Stoddart’s work does not aim to heal, yet through a cycle of seeing, understanding and reflection, it produces something akin to therapy. It reminds us that integration does not mean the banishment of shadow, but the act of giving shadow a place to live. The world of our human beings is filled with tension and contradiction, and precisely for that reason, it feels closer to lived experience. The body, faith, humour, fear — these opposites coexist on her canvas, just as they do in reality, where contradictions never fully resolve.
As a viewer, after I saw her painting, I saw the real “box theatre”, I recognised its three-dimensional echo in the box that mirrors it. Dismember My Monster touches on a distinctly contemporary question: in a world fragmented and over-saturated with information, can art still function as a tool for integration? Stoddart’s work answered this question, painting cannot repair the world, but it can provide a framework — a structure for thought and reorganisation and a visual exercise in the practice of self-integration.
Her collages are not mere assemblages; rather, she extracts and reconfigures elements that appear to follow certain rules, refining them and reshaping them into something that speaks her own visual language — something that becomes part of herself. It is like the evolution of the human soul: we inherit genes from our parents and ancestors, and through gradual transformation, we develop into who we are, eventually finding our own selves. In this sense, Stoddart’s art is both her own psychic alchemy and a mirror for our time — a visual exercise in the practice of self-integration.
Lottie Stoddart, Dismember My Monster, 11th November – 16th November 2025, The Tagli 67 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 7PT