Created for this exhibition, We Couldn't Give Her What She Needs forms part of Sophia Al-Maria’s new body of monumental ink and watercolour paintings, marking a return to her originary practice of drawing. The composition is dominated by a black silhouette, around which animal forms emerge through open mouths, taut bodies and partially resolved gestures. Layers of maroon and rust accumulate across the paper, while ink bleeds and pools, keeping the image in a state of continual formation.

The title belongs to the vocabulary of abandonment that Al-Maria traces throughout the series: phrases that explain an animal’s exclusion in the language of necessity and care. We Couldn't Give Her What She Needs shifts attention from the animal itself to the process through which responsibility is transferred onto the excluded body. The work holds this body at the crease between belonging and expulsion, behaviour and identity, where one condition folds into another rather than resolving into a fixed state.