Ivy Riddle

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.

Working across photography, video, performance, sculpture and archiving, Ivy Riddle's practice explores domestic space, how architecture intersects with memory, time, familial lineage, and the metaphysical and emotional palimpsests that shape our experience of place. ⁠

Says Riddle of this work, "This project is an act of searching without resolution; sensing a presence through space, sound, memory, and architecture, yet never being able to grasp it completely. I am investigating the emotional and metaphysical traces left behind in domestic spaces, the echoes, stains, and silent impressions that linger long after a person leaves. These remnants and domestic repetitions form a quiet tension between presence and absence, where the home exists as a palimpsest, its past and present perpetually overlapping.

"This last year, I’ve been living in a house that my late grandmother inhabited over forty years ago. This was unknown to me when I moved in, and it has redefined my relationship to these spaces and their architecture. The possessions I have inherited from her, as well as my own body, are pieces of her returning to the space. Sites of intersecting timelines and a connection to her – a version of her I never met."