Artist: Danielle Orchard

“The ordinariness of mothering—the rhythms of feeding, changing diapers, sleep, and sleeplessness—are so commonplace and mundane that they are all too easily ignored, and rendered invisible and inconsequential.” – Julia Lane and Eleonora Joensuu, “The Everyday World of Affect and Mothering”

For her first solo exhibition at Perrotin Tokyo, Danielle Orchard places the importance of the mother front and center, tackling the complexities of maternal experience. Neither overtly celebratory nor sweetly nostalgic, the women of Orchard’s paintings claim their space in the world while also hinting at the conflicting emotions and potentially fraught journeys of motherhood.

Orchard, who earned an MFA from Hunter College in New York and now works and lives in Massachusetts, specializes in traditional methods of oil painting and intentionally situates her work within an art historical lineage of figurative painting. In particular, her works reflect a clear aesthetic influence from early-twentieth century Modernist painters. The spatial flatness of Orchard’s domestic scenes acknowledge a heritage from Matisse while the monumentality of her figures echo Picasso’s and Léger’s women of the early 1920s, their thick limbs and torsos offering a sculptural heft even in their flattening. None of those obvious touchstones, however, offer much lineage of maternal depiction. For this, Orchard looks to foremothers like Paula Modersohn-Becker, whose painted nude self-portraits, including while pregnant, proved exceptional for their time by subverting the sexualized objectification of the female nude so often promoted by her Modernist male peers.

Orchard has long paid attention to depictions of the female body that are repeated throughout art history, and she thinks in particular about “the ways in which these iconic representations alternately reflect and inform how I inhabit the world as a woman.” For this exhibition, Orchard’s subjects make the move from a female body to an explicitly maternal one, signaling larger shifts in identity and cultural perception. The maternal nude, when pictured pregnant or with a small child in tow, suddenly contains multiplicities: she is both sexual and functional, gratifying and comforting. This exploration of shifting identities parallels recent trajectories in Orchard’s own life as she speaks to a history of pregnancy loss and infertility, followed by a successful pregnancy and birth. As in her previous work, however, Orchard mines personal experience as a jumping off point from which to consider broader questions of historical and cultural representations of female and maternal bodies.

Until recent decades, histories of art primarily showcased a singular mother above all others in the figure of the Virgin Mary. Endless paintings of this sacred maternal ideal did little, however, to reflect the experience of earth-bound, secular mothers, promoting an unattainable model of sacrifice and perfection. Orchard’s paintings play with this disconnect: her maternal figures fill the compositions with a visual gravity and significance akin to portrayals of the Madonna, but she brings them down to earth in domestic settings with mundane elements. In Laundress, her pregnant nude appears to daydream. She holds a tiny onesie over her belly, imagining the baby soon to be born. And yet, the pile of clothes beneath her on the bed also alludes to the impending labor of domesticity, facing the piles of laundry that the growing baby will soon create.

Neither does Orchard harbor any illusions that the life of the mother is a tranquil idyll. In Mother of Gloom, the painting that lends the show its title, a figure reclines in the moonlit night, apparently lost in thought: she is a mother in the gloom of darkness, and a mother with an affect of gloom, who lies awake with endless worries and imaginings. Small details that Orchard includes in the scene serve as reminders of the precarity of motherhood, not only pointing to the potential threat of pregnancy loss but also foreshadowing the attendant anxieties and small tragedies that inevitably punctuate the longer arc of maternity.

With this new body of work, Orchard participates in a conversation about maternal representation that has been growing exponentially since the 1970s—focused not only on making visible non-sacred models of motherhood but also on conveying the nuance of maternal experience. Late twentieth-century precedents like Alice Neel’s pregnant nudes and Renee Cox’s Yo Mama series heroicized everyday maternity and helped normalize its representation in contemporary art. Orchard now joins a vibrant community of artists and scholars who wrestle with the complexities of maternal identity and experience, alongside what it means to adhere to or depart from cultural expectations of motherhood. The flat affect in the faces of Orchard’s mothers, and their less-than-glamorous circumstances, quietly acknowledge that the path of mothering is not straightforward. Maternal love exists alongside sorrow, care and nurturing live next to the drudgery of maintenance work, and periods of ambivalence or depression make appearances as well. By using the language of formalist figure painting to juxtapose perceptions of maternity as both heroic and mundane, Orchard’s paintings make space to meditate on the complicated experiences of mothers that are still too often ignored.

Text by Rachel Epp Buller