Collage as a medium has always been a vehicle by which to explore political and social concerns.

Kelly, in this series of work, is re-contextualising the militant strategies of early feminism. The message is as much in the history of the medium itself, the awkward ancestries that it just can’t shake. In one series squawking birds prick the smooth and hairless veneer of raunch culture. In another, furry girls stare out through waves and a field of follicles.

Chopped-up, constructed beauties from the valley of the hirsute. In a world obsessed
with luxury, outfits, the right haircuts, shoes and the aspiration to live the right type of life, Kelly creates not just something new but forces us to understand through the hyperreal and the hard core, that satire is always hard to swallow.

Glenn Barkley, ‘The rough and the smooth’, Deborah Kelly catalogue, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, May 2011. 

Deborah Kelly, Beastliness, 2011, digital animation, stereo sound, 3:17 min. Deborah Kelly is represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.