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.

Says Deborah Kelly of this work: "The broken face of a goddess of beauty statue is the basis of this work contemplating abiding demands on women to appear fertile in a compulsory political economy of female value of no benefit to women.

"The work suggests that this economy, while patriarchal, is also upheld, articulated, woven and mended by women themselves.

"It further invokes the depredations of time that are the destiny of every embodied being on the earthly plane."