OPENING NIGHT I SATURDAY 15TH OF AUGUST 5PM-7PM
VIEWING DATES I 1ST OF AUGUST TIL THE 19TH OF AUGUST 2026
Long admirers of each other’s work, Loralee Jade and Ash Leslie bring together a collection shaped by a shared experience of motherhood. Loralee, in the fierce intensity of her daughter’s first years of life, is getting to know a new self while navigating the overstimulated highs and lows of early motherhood.
Ash, whose daughters are now five and eight, occupies a steadier, less consuming stage, though one laced with the quiet ache of nostalgia. From different vantage points, both painters return to the same high stakes and weight of raising daughters, understanding that motherhood asks an impossible duality: strength and softness, joy and grief, attachment and release. It is within this tension that Ash and Loralee meet.
The same balance they practice daily as mothers, they practice here as painters. Moving between figuration and abstraction, both work intuitively,allowing memory, instinct and emotion to guide the image. Their paintings do not illustrate motherhood so much as embody its physics: the tension between holding on and letting go. Throughout the exhibition, care takes many forms — tenderness, vigilance, protection, longing and devotion.
The work sits within that difficult space where love asks us to hold and release at once; to keep watch while making room, to remain tethered while accepting that separation is part of love. Together, these paintings consider the profound and often contradictory act of caring for another life: what we carry, what we protect, and what eventually must be allowed to grow beyond us.