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.

Deborah Kelly's 'Beastliness' witnesses horizonless, post-species-specific possibilities, as we tango into the far-fetched future, propelled by unchecked hungers. Human physicality is entirely transformed by the technologies of everyday life. Miraculous conceptions are ordinary, death is deferred, biology is no longer destiny. Gender imperatives mate, proliferate and mutate.

'Beastliness' invokes prancing, preening, coupling metaphor, sutured with history, folklore, mythos, queered archetype. Insult tangled with endearment acquires infinite appetite.

'Beastliness' synthesises traditional handmade photomontage with digital animation into a dalliance with predatory, reckless sirens.