Exhibits,

Sophie Coe us as stars, as horses

Opening: Wednesday 3 June 6-8pm Dates: 6 June - 28 June

Beauty is sold as empowerment, but commodifying the female body enforces social
control, limiting agency and self-actualisation. Sophie Coe’s practice demonstrates
how beauty operates as both a farce and a site of inquiry, revealing the emotional,
cognitive, and social costs of aesthetic ideals. I urge viewers to consider whose
standards they perform and how reclaiming attention from beauty culture can foster
agency, change, and self-determined goals. In collaboration with Kamilaroi curator
Tabitha Glanville, the pair cultivate a space of joy, tenderness, and mutual recognition.
A site shaped as much by artistic practice as by the deep friendship that sustains it.
The star cluster known by western knowledge as the Pleiades is understood by
Kamilaroi people as miyay‐miyay, meaning group of girls. This constellation is a
gathering place, a story of sisters, a reminder of the protective and luminous force of
women moving together. Coe and Glanville centre this knowledge as a portal for
healing, kinship, and return. ‘Us as stars, as horses’ draws these threads into a shared
horizon. Velvet, warm light, and punching colour create an atmosphere of safety, an
invitation to step inside the quiet power of women’s love, care, and interdependence.
The exhibition becomes a constellation in its own right, both artists orbiting one
another, holding space through grief, through change, through the everyday work of
staying alive and staying connected.
Kinship is not an aside, it is a methodology. These bodies of work are the trace of that
friendship, glowing like stars that have always known how to find each other in the
dark.