… The work of Charlotte Lindsay suggests that binaries of the sexes are not revealed to ensure equality, but rather to keep balance, a subtle difference of focus that steers us towards the poetics rather than the politics of male and female relationships…
… All works by Wen Wu and Charlotte Lindsay marry emotional inexplicability with instinctive bodily need. Playing once again with traditionally gendered roles, Wu paints two pictures of the Father and Child. She obscures meaning by smearing faces, whilst Lindsay hides everything and at the same time exposes it all, by presenting the body only in pieces. Returning to my ‘maternal’ suggestions, could it be that all of these works are in a way embryos created, carried and birthed? Does this explain why the works speak sometimes of the male and sometimes of the female? Is this the complexity of the ‘woman artist’, that the web of maternity ensnares her at the same time as the work itself? Whether yes or no, Wu and Lindsay do not claim to know the answers; in obscuring, hiding, or even choking mouths with fabric – as in Little bag of money – they show that they cannot really speak of this. They find reassuring devices, be it the traditional oval framing of a parent and child or the timely construction of a small box, to depict what are in fact the most difficult, disruptive and kinetic aspects of the human condition. Like all great artists, Wu and Lindsay start a treasure hunt upon which it is not for them to find the treasure…