Deborah Kelly’s vibrant collage animation Beastliness presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the future. Featuring a cast of hybrid creatures created from the pages of obsolete encyclopaedias, textbooks and natural history magazines, Kelly uses the scaffolds of old scientific knowledge to create an alternative reality free from the constraints of heteronormativity. The work, which invokes a wild sense of sexual liberation and hedonism, also features symbolic representations of fertility and reproduction (such as nests of spinning eggs) that celebrate the corporeal magic of birth and rebirth.

Beastliness takes as many aesthetic cues from MTV as it does from photomontage pioneer Hannah Hoch and other proponents of early twentieth-century European Dada. Kelly’s uncanny fusion of animals, insects and women placed in a world of frenzied dancing presents a bacchanalian fantasy in the form of a cultural critique. Feathers fly as the creatures consume each other in a conclusion that formally resembles an ouroboros — the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail, representing the circle of life and, in some contexts, immortality.

By remythologising femininity, Kelly considers stereotypes and other expectations that can demonise difference. Challenging stable notions of gender, the artist stands against any rhetoric that aims to divide and control us by proposing a predefined ‘normality’. Her strategy is to embrace diversity: these creatures represent many female forms, thoughts and experiences, and celebrate acceptance and freedom of expression.