Birth

Madeline Donahue is an artist gaining increasing attention for her no-holds-barred meditations on motherhood and care work, a subset of her longstanding interest in the female body and issues of shame or social revulsion often attached to it (often not by women). She works across media, in clay, drawing and painting. This work depicts a scene partially real and part imagined: Donahue has given birth to two children who are still young, although her older daughter did not help as directly as depicted. Her practice deftly navigates between the public and private, and between offering parts of her biography and everyday life experience to viewers while remaining abstracted or distanced through the pared-down lines used to adumbrate the figures in her work. The artist reflects that invariably when people view or purchase her work and she is present, it catalyzes them to tell her a story about their own mothers or their lives, which she enjoys listening to. Her work employs a deep humor and comedy, but often balances between the joy the artist experiences as a parent and what she has termed the abject discomfort and occasional humiliation of her body being forever associated with her children by the art world--and the wider world.