Annie Trevorah: Dolly's Clinic

Trevorah transforms the gallery into a meticulously realised aesthetics clinic populated by six sculpted animal patients, each with their own signature procedure, consultant’s notes and recovery plan. The familiar language and rituals of the contemporary beauty industry are reimagined through a cast of autonomous animal protagonists, inviting visitors to question who has the right to shape a body, and for whose benefit. Taking its name from Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, the exhibition draws on Trevorah’s research into cosmetic surgery, undertaken during a residency at the practice of Dr Arash Khademi (Dr Kay), alongside medieval bestiaries and the surrealist imagination of Leonora Carrington. Like Carrington before her, Trevorah imagines animals not as metaphors but as protagonists: creatures endowed with consciousness, desire and individual identity. Darkly humorous, provocative and visually seductive, the sculptures are cast in matte aluminium and enriched with seed pods, feathers, glass, leather, resin and textiles. Blurring distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the familiar and the mythological, Dolly’s Clinic continues Trevorah’s wider enquiry into aesthetics, bodily modification and the politics of appearance.