In Bodies We Invent, WALLACHILD collapses the distance between woman and animal, exposing the unstable border where culture repeatedly negotiates who is permitted full humanity. Refusing anatomical certainty, the paintings occupy a threshold populated by hybrid bodies that are neither entirely human nor wholly beast. Flesh slips into fur, limbs dissolve into hooves, faces become snouts, and the distinction between portrait and carcass remains deliberately unresolved. These are not mythical creatures, nor are they allegories of transformation. They are portraits of classification itself: of the social impulse to construct hierarchies by deciding which bodies deserve empathy and which exist to be consumed.

The series borrows its visual language from excess. Thick accumulations of paint, fractured anatomy, and seductive color fields entice the viewer before revealing a quieter violence beneath their surface. WALLACHILD understands beauty as one of power’s most effective disguises. Like the polished language of fashion editorials, luxury advertising, and contemporary image culture, the paintings lure before they implicate. Their abstraction is intentional, functioning not as concealment but as a mirror of the systems they critique: systems that aestheticize domination until it becomes difficult to distinguish desire from exploitation.

Throughout the series, the female body is treated as a contested species. Echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s observation in The Second Sex that woman is socially produced as “the Other,” these figures reveal how femininity has long been constructed through comparisons to nature, instinct, reproduction, domestication, and animality rather than autonomous subjecthood. Biology becomes ideology. Flesh becomes category. The paintings ask whether the boundary between “woman” and “animal” has ever truly been biological, or whether it has always been a political fiction maintained through language, ritual, and representation. 

George Orwell’s Animal Farm lingers over the series not as a direct narrative reference but as a structural one. Orwell’s fable exposes how power depends upon the manipulation of categories and language until inequality appears inevitable. WALLACHILD extends this logic toward gender, examining how women have historically occupied a symbolic position disturbingly adjacent to domesticated animals: bred, displayed, disciplined, exchanged, sentimentalized, protected, and consumed according to shifting social needs. The distinction between caretaker and owner, affection and possession, repeatedly collapses.

Francisco Goya’s late paintings likewise haunt these works. Like Goya’s Black Paintings, Bodies We Invent rejects clean moral narratives in favor of psychological landscapes where brutality emerges not as spectacle but as ordinary behavior. Disorder becomes its own form of clarity. The grotesque is never employed for shock alone; it reveals the irrational machinery operating beneath societies that imagine themselves civilized.

Contemporary editorial photography also serves as an unexpected influence. Fashion imagery routinely fragments the female body into consumable parts while presenting submission as aspiration and passivity as elegance. WALLACHILD appropriates this visual seduction only to destabilize it. The figures resist becoming products even as they remain trapped within the visual economies that produce them. Their beauty is inseparable from their disfigurement, suggesting that commodification rarely announces itself as violence. More often, it arrives beautifully lit.

Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh provides another conceptual framework, particularly its interrogation of the linguistic mechanisms that allow violence to become ordinary. In Bazterrica’s world, the transformation of humans into livestock depends first upon changing the vocabulary used to describe them. WALLACHILD adopts a similar strategy visually, asking what happens when women are repeatedly represented as instinctual, edible, reproductive, decorative, or domesticated. The paintings propose that the distance between metaphor and policy, image and institution, is far smaller than it appears. Dehumanization rarely begins with physical violence; it begins with the invention of categories that make violence appear natural. 

Yet the title, Bodies We Invent, deliberately shifts responsibility back toward the viewer. The paintings do not claim that women are animals, nor that animals are women. Instead, they ask who benefits from drawing such distinctions in the first place. Every civilization invents bodies before it governs them. It invents ideals of femininity, definitions of purity, acceptable expressions of desire, proper forms of labor, and legitimate recipients of empathy. These inventions become so familiar that they masquerade as nature itself.

Across WALLACHILD’s broader practice, identity is never presented as a stable condition but as something rehearsed, inherited, and continually negotiated through collective mythologies. Bodies We Invent extends this investigation by confronting one of culture’s oldest strategies of domination: the reduction of living beings into symbols that can be possessed without consequence. The resulting figures remain unresolved, suspended between tenderness and brutality, attraction and revulsion, humanity and animality. They refuse the comfort of fixed categories, insisting instead that the most unsettling monsters are often the classifications societies create and the ease with which they learn to believe them.