There are worlds in which no creature is ever truly born alone, and Ivy Chilelli’s sculptures seem to come from one of them. Here, bodies germinate, mutate, shed their skin, crystallise and dissolve, only to reassemble in new forms. Nothing exists in isolation: every organism is already part of another life, and every boundary is more permeable than it appears.
Drawing on posthuman, ecofeminist and transfeminist thought, Chilelli challenges the very idea of the individual as an autonomous entity. In its place, she imagines a cosmology founded on interdependence, transformation and care. The creatures inhabiting her works appear to belong to a time before classification, when mineral, plant, animal and human forms still shared the same language. Rather than depicting another world, they reveal a possibility that has always existed within our own.
The forms Chilelli creates reject the violence of separation. Her sculptures inhabit a threshold space where identities remain porous and transformation is welcomed rather than feared. They are neither objects nor monuments, but organisms: bodies captured at the moment they are becoming something else. Their political dimension lies precisely in this constant openness to change. The queer body is not presented as an exception or metaphor, but as a condition of existence itself – unfinished, self-determined and perpetually capable of exceeding the boundaries imposed upon it.
Against any worldview that places human beings at the summit of all living forms, Chilelli proposes an ethics of coexistence. Her work quietly dismantles anthropocentric hierarchies, reminding us that survival has never been an individual matter, but a practice grounded in relationships. Care extends beyond the human community to encompass plants, minerals, fungi and invisible ecosystems. A body is never singular, but an ecosystem: a temporary alliance between different lives that learn, even if only for a moment, to sustain one another.
Presented at ReA Art Fair 2026, Relief Web II (2026) and two works from the series In Flesh, You’re Gone I & II (2026) trace two complementary movements within the same mythology.
Relief Web II develops vertically. Three resin bodies containing ceramic fragments and dried flowers are held together by taut steel cables, as though their ability to resist gravity depended entirely on their relationship with one another. They resemble an unknown constellation or the first traces of a species still taking shape: a collective body formed through care.
The works from the series In Flesh, You’re Gone, by contrast, extend downwards. Chrome-glazed ceramic flowers release long lengths of fabric that slowly spread across the floor, carrying memory into space like roots searching for another body to inhabit. What once belonged to a whole separates gently, and each fragment becomes both a relic and the possibility of new life.
Between elevation and descent, crystallisation and dissolution, Chilelli constructs a cosmology in which fragility is not the opposite of strength, but the very condition that makes it possible.
Chilelli’s sculptures never ask what a body is. Instead, they invite us to imagine forms of kinship that do not depend on resemblance. In her work, becoming matters more than being, and every body remains joyfully unfinished: open to contamination, encounter and the possibility that what we call foreign may simply be another form of ourselves.
Text by Vittoria Martinotti