Jenny Orchard | A new weird, wonderful

Jenny Orchard creates fantastical creatures and monsters to imagine new weird and wonderful worlds. In a practice of forty-six years, she has worked across drawing, collage, and ceramics to build and shape a new vision of a world where we see ourselves as one with nature.

An African folktale was told to Jenny Orchard as a child, in which a woman follows an impossibly beautiful man into a forest. Against his warnings to turn back to the village she is transfixed and cannot, she watches in horror as his limbs are replaced by branches and leaves. He slowly transforms into the forest around him. The woman is trapped. She has been enchanted by the forest and can no longer return home.

This tale of vivid enchantment with nature has long held Orchard’s imagination. For her, nature is entwined with human existence, not separate from it. Her childhood in Zimbabwe (southeast Africa) and its folklores are just some of the elements that take form in her fantastical creatures. Traditional folktales, biotechnology, pop culture, and nature are central to the surreal characters and narratives in her drawings, collages, and ceramics. Orchard’s work resonates with the surreal books of authors Gabriel García Márquez, and Nigerian mid-century author Amos Tutuola. Embracing the weird and the wonderful allows Orchard to respond to turbulent social and political forces and create worlds to reimagine a way new of being.

Visiting Jenny at her home and studio in inner-Sydney, her worldview and practice surround her. Art and nature are entwined. Handmade colourful tiles covering the front porch welcome you brightly. Vibrant ceramics, collages, and tall hand-built totems are dispersed throughout the house and spill out into the garden behind—winking messengers of stories and characters from her practice.

Born in Turkey, Orchard grew up in Zimbabwe from the age of five, and then as a young adult lived in London, followed by Sydney where she studied ceramics at Alexander Mackie College (now UNSW Art & Design). The itinerant nature of her coming of age means that the artist sees herself as a citizen of the world rather than identifying with one country. This varied life existence has fed into the kaleidoscopic vision of Jenny’s hyperreal work that can’t be centralised to one place or story.

Across her practice Orchard has embraced subversion. She examines social and aesthetic paradigms and reimagines them—whether it is her early whimsical, slanted yet functional teapots; vases and vessels inspired by the Memphis Design Group, Milan; or her examination of genes and biotechnologies and their spiritual and ethical concerns in her 2014 PhD studies. Across this study, her functional vessels began to grow faces and arms and legs, and her work grew into totems, creatures, and the creation of expressive environments.

One key influence on her outlook is the idea of object-orientated ontology as outlined in Timothy Morton’s 2017 book Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People—in which there is a non-hierarchical view of life on earth. Instead of anthropocentrism which separates humans from the natural world—the organic and inorganic—her totems and drawings are of creatures that are both animal and plant. In the progression of her work, Orchard empathetically suggests alternative environments that draw us closer to the natural world and embed our place within it.

The reimagining of new worlds culminated in her wondrous installation The Imagined Possibility of Unity, which won Orchard the Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Art Award in 2017. Ceramic totems and small figures formed an ecosystem of horror and delight, whimsy and earnestness, real and imagined. The joy of Orchard’s work is that it can be two things at once. In experiencing this duality of feeling we can appreciate the complexity of the world around us. Discussing the impetus behind this futuristic installation, Orchard stated, “my work is an attempt to provoke questioning. I choose not to use shock, but to try to express wonder, and a gentle probing or provocation to look at the diversity and connections in the lively world around us.”

In creating her own fictions and contemporary folklores Orchard playfully draws from our everyday. Of her intuitive process she states, “it’s like catching an idea—seeing a form in the garden or having an experience of a creature and catching that moment where it is inspiring, and you are not quite sure why. I’ll do a few drawings, make notes, do some more drawing, and I start making, I do it all by hand. I feel like I am talking to this evolving creature, and when I can look it in the eye, and we can laugh together—there is that communication. I want to pull together all those vibrations, different energies into a piece that has a life of its own.”

Like the man in the forest, Orchard’s detailed drawings, collages, and ceramic figures are made up of diverse limbs and body parts—hybrids of plant, animal, and inorganic matter. The blurring of boundaries—the real and familiar—allows for infinite imaginative possibilities. The figures are filled with intricate surfaces: perforated, plugged, and patterned. Delight is in the detail. Zimbird, 2024, has a reptilian sea creature body that is met with a King Kong-esque tail, a third eye bursts forward unblinking from its chest, and fiery red flames shoot upwards from its crown. Vibrant colours and Orchard-esque details, including painted red toenails, are among a plethora of textures and curiosities to draw us in and make our own connections with this wondrous creature.

When viewing Orchard’s creatures, there is a resonance with the stories of author Salman Rushdie whose characters’ lives transcend the limits and bounds of reality or sense. Explaining the absence of boundaries in his work, the author stated, “the world has ceased to be realistic.” Like Rushdie, Orchard responds to the weirdness of the world by creating surreal hybrid creatures and alternative environments to challenge dominant social paradigms and expose the unexplainable forces that threaten us.

In her upcoming exhibition Multicreature and the Monster [Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney], Orchard embraces horror and optimism in response to forces of recent climate events and political realities. Her hybrid monsters and Multicreatures remind us of a greater world that we are a part of as she states, “This is my quest, to acknowledge the sacred nature and wonder of all life, including the life of the planet. My ceramic Multicreatures and inkbrush drawings are a call to arms, in the spirit of determination to bring peace and healing to the world.” Here fiction, folklore, and nature merge where the monster is now a hero in Orchard’s narrative, a larger-than-life figure that will protect the greater planet, and a poignant reminder of our connection to nature.

As we finish the interview, we tour the garden filled with Orchard’s ceramic totems. There at the back stands a tall, majestic totem—a ceramic head perched upon an old tree fern. After the fern died, Orchard transformed the fern to create a new hybrid. Like the man and the forest, nature and ceramics have morphed—a poetic act and seemingly serendipitous expression of Orchard’s worldview.

Exhibition
The Multicreature and the Monster
1 April – 3 May 2025
Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artist, Stella Downer Fine Arts, Sydney, Despard Gallery, Hobart, and Shepparton Art Museum, Victoria