Design and Art Australia Online

Born in 1951 in Ankara, Turkey, Jenny Orchard was the only child of a British army officer and his wife. She was five when her father left the army and went to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in southern Africa in search of work and a warmer climate. She has vivid childhood memories of Rhodesia: her first glimpses from the window of her parents’ car of “red earth, scattered trees and vast horizon – and the animals. The natural world was abundant in the innocence of childhood. I formed a concept of how the world could be – a world view in which animals and humans co-existed.” Three decades after leaving the country, these experiences are still the “home of the mind “ for her – “even though Zimbabwe is now not a place to call home”.

Orchard grew up in the suburbs of Salisbury (now Harare), attending the local primary and girls high school. She left school early to work as a draftsperson. Her parents had stayed on despite Prime Minister Ian Smith’s 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the United Kingdom to enable the continuation of white minority rule, and the economic sanctions and international pressure that followed.

In 1969 Orchard left Rhodesia and spent six years in 'swinging’ London, before heading for Australia with her Rhodesian born husband to be. She finished her secondary schooling at Randwick Tech and in 1977 started a BA at Alexander Mackie Teachers’ College. In 1979 she left art school to focus on making and selling the offbeat cups, bowls, vases and teapots she had begun producing after a semester of ceramics tuition at Alexander Mackie. Ettore Sottsass and his Memphis group of Italian design radicals were a formative influence on these quirky vessels with their brightly-coloured and patterned surfaces. In 1981, the year the first of her two children was born, she also had her first solo exhibition at Blackfriars Gallery in Sydney. The acquisition in 1983 by the National Gallery of Australia of two vases and a teapot and, by Elton John, of almost an entire exhibition of her vessels further encouraged her in this direction.

Jenny’s ceramic 'creatures’ grew out of her vessels – literally; they turned into creatures, which in retrospect reminded her of the strange dolls she used to make from wood and fabric as imaginary friends in a lonely childhood. These poignant oddities sold well, mostly to friends who visited the studio she rented at Blackwattle Bay, Glebe (NSW) in the mid 1980s once her children were old enough to attend school. Her neighbour at Blackwattle, sculptor Stephen Birch, encouraged her to exhibit the figures, which she did at Macquarie Galleries and later Barry Stern Galleries in Sydney.

Orchard began teaching ceramics in 1982; she has taught at various tertiary colleges including the College of Fine Arts – University of New South Wales, Sydney College of the Arts – University of Sydney and the National Art School, Sydney. Following a major exhibition in 1999 of the totems at Customs House Circular Quay Sydney she was offered a part-time position at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.

Orchard continued to work with Birch, with whom she shared studios at the Wharf, Newtown and finally Paddington. At the time of Birch’s death in 2007, Orchard was studying full-time at Sydney College of the Arts, completing an MA in Visual Arts with a thesis entitled “Creatures of Consequence” which explored her interest in “multi-species empathy”. Orchard sees both her totems and her figures as “multi-fit life forms”. She refers to the latter as her “creatures” with their own personalities, and furnishes them with poetic extended titles and accompanying texts that flesh out their imaginary lives. While she describes her intentions as “reasonably light-hearted”, there is a serious side to them too: “The totems represent unity, as each element of them embodies a particular form of celestial life. They also speak of death – metempsychosis – as the spirits of the departed exist in a place where neither time nor space has relevance, but the power of memory and the life force of those they come into contact with can give objects 'life’”. Orchard cites the sixth century Greek philosopher Parmenides as her primary intellectual influence and has studied extensively the debates around genetic engineering and experimental life forms. Her “creatures” are endowed with capacities for pleasure and pain hardly envisaged by the creators of cloned sheep or genetically modified foods. They express her reverence for all life and the empathy she feels with such forms.

Orchard has exhibited widely in Australia and participated in shows in Japan, Germany, Italy and the USA. Her commissions include ceramic murals for the Sheraton International Hotel, Arlington Virginia, USA (1987), ceramic fish for Vatuele Resort Fiji (1990), a 6 metre tall public sculpture in pressed metal in Paddington Sydney (2000/2001). In 2002, her work was acquired by the Schubert International Ceramic Award, Gold Coast Queensland. Her work is represented in most state and regional galleries, many major private collections and the Aichi Prefecture Government Design Collection, Japan.

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