"In Firstborn, Danielle Orchard's lush, velvety paintings revel in the primal chaos of early motherhood-from gestation to childbirth and childrearing-offering deeply symbolic compositions that mine the spiritual, psychological, and corporeal complexities inherent to the nurturance of life. As discrete acts of material creation, painting and mothering here go hand in hand: each function as an embodied experience that necessitates a well of stamina and intuition, invariably redrawing the somatic boundaries of the practitioner."
"In Presentation (all works 2025), one of the largest new paintings in the exhibition, a supine woman rests on a verdant cloth, her body splayed across a well-lit stage as an object of public examination-a nod to historical depictions of the reclining female figure. Recalling the cubist forms of Picasso, the romanticized nudes of Rousseau, as well as 18th century paintings of surgical amphitheaters, the figure here is a pregnant nude undergoing a caesarian section-a procedure rarely, if ever, represented in painting-"
Firstborn traces the transformative and fragile terrain of early parenthood, portraying moments of quiet vigilance, sudden intensity, and tender care alongside daily rhythms. The paintings capture intimate encounters and examine the interplay between the physical and the symbolic, mining spiritual, psychological, and corporeal complexities of nurturance. Painting and mothering are presented as discrete but parallel acts of material creation that demand stamina and intuition and reshape somatic boundaries. Works reference art history—cubist forms, romanticized nudes, and surgical amphitheaters—while a sophisticated palette and velvety surfaces produce surreal, organic compositions, including a caesarian depiction with a baby pulling an umbilical cord.
Read at Juxtapoz
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]