Inherited Bodies: A Semi-Retrospective Exhibition by Carli Adby
FEBRUARY - MAY 2026
PRIVATE VIEW: FEBRUARY 11TH (18:30 - 20:30)
Location: Upper Gallery, Kentish Town Health Centre, 2 Bartholomew Rd London · NW5 2BX
‘Inherited Bodies’ is a semi-retrospective exhibition by artist Carli Adby, with photographic, archival, and experimental works exploring how women’s health — and the language that surrounds it — is experienced, represented, and inherited.
Grounded in lived experiences of PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), POI (Premature Ovarian Insufficiency), Menopause and severe PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) - ‘Inherited Bodies’ questions who determines and defines what is “normal” or “dysfunctional”.
Adby’s collection of projects are both personal and collective. Weaving together women’s stories, ‘Inherited Bodies’ examines how societal and political narratives impact the relationships we have with ourselves and others. It explores the absence of choice in what we bear; biologically and culturally. It questions the extent of biological inheritance and its potential for change.
‘Inherited Bodies’ brings personal artefacts, research and present-day experiences to trace a history of women reduced to wombs and symptoms. Maternal identity, ageing, fertility and health are held side-by-side with what it means to truly live as a mother, a daughter and as a woman.
'Inherited Bodies' opens space for complexity, asking how gender, diagnosis, and language shape care, identity, and belonging. It is not about the ‘broken’, but about a sense of self and autonomy for our body and health - reclaimed through dialogue, creativity and connection.
About Carli Adby:
Much of my work is rooted in feminist thinking and grounded in lived experience, continually exploring questions of self hood and the performance of Gender. More recently, it adopts a heavily research-based approach, challenging the medicalisation of the “female” body and ageing, particularly when, for the most part, we are considered reproductive or maternal by default.
Working in the intersections between photography, contemporary art, health, feminist research and lived experience; I use the language of the body to question how women are seen, spoken about and treated. Across these projects runs a sense of reclamation: an attention to the continuity and fragility of women’s experience, the language and legacy of medicine and motherhood, and the ways our bodies hold memory, trauma, resilience and invite conjecture.
Using lived experience, I attempt to interrogate these ideals through photography, historical texts and archives, as well as mixed media including audio, collage and sculpture. Experimenting with these mediums I have explored making handmade paper, which literally embodies these inherent concepts by combining photographic prints, written journals and the residue of both my own and others’ bodies.
Current work in progress continues to interrogate the politics of medicine, gender, love and memory through the language of the body, asking how historical narratives shape our performances as women and how we come to identify ourselves within these pre-determined teachings.I am particularly interested in the menopause and its “wet” and “dry” elements, alongside the repetitive medical terminology that suggests an inescapable lack in women, through words such as “insufficient” or “dysfunctional”.
These concerns sit within a wider questioning of the Western medical system – one that idolises youth and fertility, lacks contemporary education and research, and is built upon an inherently biased, gendered framework with long-embedded expectations of women and their bodies. How do we inhabit a space we often do not have the language to examine, and where there is little will to revise the narratives that already exist?
As a woman and as an artist, I am interested in how a lens-based practice, grounded in lived experience and developed through participatory and interdisciplinary collaboration, can contribute to wider dialogue, autonomy and inclusion, and can help interrogate the deeply ingrained systemic biases that shape our choices and our sense of self.
Please note that these events are being filmed and photographed for internal and external purposes.
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