Deborah Kelly

This work is part of Curatorial+Co.'s 2026 group exhibition, 'The Beast In Me'.

Of all the internal mechanisms that drive us, perhaps the most primordial is the beast. We expel the animal, the bodily, the base in favour of the intellect, yet it is the beast that holds what is most irreducibly human—impulses and desires that precede thought: love, rage, care, protection, connection. The very thing we suppress is also the thing that touches what is most vital.

Rather than revealing which parts of ourselves are more animal, 'The Beast in Me' considers which parts of ourselves we have expelled in order to become more human. What makes these works transgressive is not their subject matter but how they collapse the border between human and animal, self and body, civility and instinct. The beast and the artist emerge from the same ungovernable place, each carrying the dread of what they might reveal; to create from this place is to set the animal loose.