Jenny Orchard was born in Turkey, grew up in Zimbabwe and now lives in Sydney. She has had a career in ceramics, sculpture and art making since 1980. With a continuous exhibiting timeline from the Post -Modern to the present day- Post- Natural she continues to explore a personal cosmology of contemporary and historical diversity and belief.
Jenny is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, State and Regional galleries all over the country, and in Japanese, American and UK collections.
Jenny was selected to participate in the Sidney Myer Ceramic Award and will be demonstrating at the masters demonstrations at the Gulgong International Ceramic Biennale in 2018.
Stephen Bowers. Managing director of the Jam Factory Contemporary Craft and Design. Catalogue profile:
“With Jenny Orchard we are in the realms of highly charged votive objects and a very special kind of emotive and individualised expression. Her startlingly organic figures are disturbingly rich animistic and vegetative embodiments, strange figurative compositions, others assembled and skewered on central supporting steel shafts, reaching back to the fecund origins of ceramic craft and folkloric, magical and decorative traditions.
These are metaphoric and philosophic beings are channelled and drawn from a spirit world by the magnetism of Orchards imagination.
Like ectoplasm with CV,s they offer evidence of the inner workings of mind, dream, spirit and memory. They bring to our larger shared world their primitive independence.
The stories of their brightly coloured lives can almost be read like tattoos across their richly textured skins. Orchard’s forms are suggestively shell like, at once fragile and complex, they have a strangely vulnerable presence and their purpose is perhaps an ultimately unknowable mystery.”
Jan Guy, head of ceramics Sydney college of the arts – Catalogue profile:
“….they are beautiful ornate abominations who have come to teach, inspire and reside amongst us. They bring with them their histories, which are also ours….…”
Exhibitions
