Sadhbha Cockburn

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.

Examining the affective relationships between humans and their environments, Sadhbha Cockburn works across the mediums of sculpture, drawing, photography and poetry. Made predominantly from found and biodegradable materials, she juxtaposes fabricated industrial objects with domestic handicraft to draw attention to the labour of creation. Inspired by the Greek word oikos, meaning ‘habitat or home’, from which we derive the English term ecology, the works exhibited consider how the creation of feeling can draw attention to the boundaries between internal and external environments.