Jenny Orchard

Jenny Orchard is a contemporary artist who has been working in ceramics, drawing, painting, and collage since 1980. She is represented in public and private collections in Australia, Japan, Italy, the UK, Jakarta, Seoul, and the USA. The clay material of her Totemic hybrids and vibrant Plantanimals employs the primal source of life, the earth. They are colourful, richly textured, visually familiar but strange, both beautiful and dissonant, challenging ideas of hierarchy, social and geo-biological boundaries.  Her work explores a personal cosmology of contemporary and historical diversity and belief. Combining elements of plant, animal, mythological and spiritual, the role of her hybrid creates a narrative of transformation and becoming. Their central idea is that the role of the living hybrid as a cultural symbol is one of freedom, resistance and constant change, with unbounded relational, material and spiritual realities and possibilities.