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Excursions Outside the Orangery – Emma Itzstein Words by Ellen Keillar

I scarcely remember a time before motherhood. Fleeting moments waft under my nose, the scent of jasmine a distant memory of a time that married stillness with speed. A time where I could follow the sun, twisting, turning, unfolding. I wander slowly through the garden. The heat of the orangery envelops me, the sun a burning warmth on the back of my head. For a moment, I am still again. Motionless. To sit within Excursions Outside the Orangery is to traverse through the seasons of matresence. Emma Itzstein invites viewers to consider motherhood not as a fixed state, but as a living garden where multiple selves continually unfurl. The series of paintings are cultivated through intuition and care, a tending of the artists inner world from which seeds of renewal are germinated. Inspired by a trip to Kew Gardens, Itzstein has a unique capacity to depict floral scenes as an expression of motherhood; of yield and yearning. For Itzstein, the orangery acts as a provocation on care. It is a metaphor for early motherhood. The artist presents the glass house as an intentional environment; one that shelters, regulates and sustains the conditions through which new life is nurtured. Employing gestural symbolism, Itzstein depicts the orangery as housing both mother and baby, fruit and flower. In A Miniature Endeavour (Held like Dew), a mother becoming, round-bellied, is partially obscured by the creeping leaves of a vine. Whilst in a Womb of Glass Rain and Green Light, a maternal shadow emerges like a flower. Spatial temporality unsettles any singular moment in time. Mother and baby are suspended in a space sheltered from the world. Yet it remains difficult to know whether the viewer is looking into the glasshouse, or whether the artwork quietly returns the gaze. This deliberate spatial confusion invites us to sit in the orangery. Like mother and seedling, we breathe in warm humid air. And with each breath we are asked to examine the depths of care required to cultivate new life. As you step through the artists garden of motherhood, abstracted figures slowly dissolve behind layers of oil, acrylic and sand, the orangery makes way for the meadow.

Rewilding after the Rain is bursting with life, robust, diverse, reinvigorated. Itzstein depicts a field of flowers and grasses against the backdrop of a dissipating storm. The painting evokes the full vitality of life, of motherhood as a complex ecosystem where all flourishing is mutual. The series of works outside the orangery explore rewilding, not as a rejection of care but as a recovery of multiplicity. The mother moves from cultivated enclosure to broader terrain, where she is not only caregiver but also wanderer, artist, lover, thinker, and embodied subject. It is embodiment that Itzstein renders with remarkable sensitivity. Each and every artwork starts with another, a base layer, drawn from art history, from memory or emotion. Often figurative the initial images that Itzstein paints are always symbolic. Here, she embeds a deeper layer of meaning as the canvas becomes both a physical and conceptual container for layers of story. In Excursions Outside the Orangery Itzstein has explored motifs and representations of motherhood, as borrowed from luminaries such as Mary Cassat, Alice Neel and Arpita Signh. In many ways the original painting is the soil, from which she cultivates the final artwork, sometimes you will observe traces of the fertile ground, other times the garden grows bountifully masking the earth below. For Itzstein tending to a painting is like tending to both motherhood and the garden. The hardest part is knowing when to let go: to step back and trust that the artwork, the child, the plant, will flourish on its own. Excursions Outside the Orangery reminds us that art can carry us to faraway places while returning us to an inner memory of self. Stepping out from orangery to the meadow, the exhibition offers a gentle immersion into the changing seasons of maternal wandering, where growth and containment go hand in hand.

Emma Itzstein Veil of Tender Heat, 2026 oil, acrylic and sand on stretched linen 112 x 112 cm #42469 $6,600