Mother & Artist Loralee Jade

If life is a mirror, can you see what I see? There is a space between the becoming & the arrival we find ourselves seeking more from what the world has shown us. The past paints the future in shades of darkness & light. It can also ask us to create new meaning once we are ready to open our eyes. For Mother & Artist Loralee Jade, colour lives in the space between. The intangible is an imprint. The divine exists beside grief. And motherhood is the mirror.

What colour does motherhood look like for you?

My first instinct is lavender, a soft lilac haze, but that’s my daughter, not motherhood itself. And I don’t think motherhood can be just one colour. I’ve never experienced anything in isolation. It’s always an interaction. There are two of us inside this bubble. She has to be here for it to be my motherhood, but it isn’t hers. Maybe the colour lives in the space between us. The meeting of maiden and mother. The transition shaping the present. It’s a warm powder blue, deepening with each resettling cuddle through the night. An eggshell beige ripening to yellow ochre with every new tooth. A pomegranate red that softens with a single blink. Magenta threaded with pale sage, because how could my own parents not be present here too?

What parts of yourself do you see in your daughter?

I see my desire for connection in her gripping fingers and stomping feet. The way she reaches with her whole body. The way she insists on closeness. I see my sensitivity in how quickly she studies a room before settling. I see my intensity in her determination, the refusal to abandon something once she’s decided it matters. She mirrors back parts of myself I hadn’t yet found the courage to be compassionate with. My impatience. My tenderness. My need to be seen. Until she asked me for patience I didn’t realise how little of it I’d extended to myself. There is something disarming about recognising yourself in someone so small. She feels innately familiar to me, as though I’ve known her before. And yet she is entirely her own. Just tonight I sat watching her sleeping face and realised that although something in her feels recognisable, I’ve never actually seen her before, she is becoming in real time. And in loving her, I am meeting myself again, not as I was, but with more gentleness.

When you are creating, what does it sound like? Internally or externally?

Externally, it’s usually classical piano, something repetitive and spacious, or the soft static of white noise through a baby monitor. The domestic hum. The reassurance that she’s sleeping. Internally, it’s different. It feels more like a tunnel of humming. Not silence exactly, but a kind of contained resonance. Sometimes phrases or words get caught in loops, circling until they dissolve. But mostly it’s a void of sound, a steady, physical quiet

You work predominantly with silk. What parts of this element fascinate you the most?

The tenderness. No matter the form, the colour, or the emotion fused into its fibres, the lustre remains, it still reads as fragile. As sensitive. As something that requires care. I think it’s the closest material translation I’ve found for how I move through the world. Silk can hold intensity without losing its softness. It can carry weight and still appear light. That tension fascinates me. There’s also a thread of nostalgia woven through it, a quiet nod to my mother. When I was a toddler, I would follow her around the house holding the edge of her silk dressing gown in my hands. I was an incredibly quiet child, the youngest of four (at the time), and I always seemed to crave more of her than she could give. I would call out “dummy, silky, bottle” my small list of comforts, as if naming them might steady me. Eventually she cut a strip from that gown for me to keep. The first one was bright pink, printed with pigs floating in hot air balloons. It was pinned into my pockets throughout primary school. It became my safety. When my father died, I placed that bright pink strip of silk into his hand when I said goodbye. The one I have now is another early strip, light pink, softer in tone. A quieter relic. I still keep it. A small, worn fragment of something that once steadied me. If there were a fabric that described me, it would have to be silk.

How has giving birth changed the way you see humanity?

I’m only a year and a half into motherhood and I still haven’t managed to catch up with the changes enough to put them neatly into words. All I know is that nothing reads the same anymore. We all arrive here completely dependent on another’s care. We begin by trusting a select few who become familiar to us. We learn through trial and error, through play, through reaching and falling. Watching her has made that truth impossible to ignore.  There isn’t a single person I can look at now without recognising that they are someone’s child. The weight of that. The invisible thread tying every body back to the one that carried it. The weight of all mothers. Birth collapses the illusion of separateness. Everyone feels once-small. Everyone feels breakable. And that shifts the way you move through the world, softer, more aware, more responsible for how gently you hold what is not yours.

What is your first memory of creating something you felt proud of?

So many memories surface when I sit with this. I remember my older sister congratulating me for colouring inside the lines. We were sitting on the top bunk, working on an image of an owl. I must have been very small. I remember the feeling when drawing, the quiet satisfaction of doing something carefully and being seen for it. Later I drew a portrait of my Pa and became a finalist in a competition. I was flown to Melbourne. That was the first time I understood that something I made could travel further than I could. But the memory that feels like a turning point came after my dad died. I painted a portrait of him, not as I knew him, but from a photograph taken before he met my mum, before he was anyone’s father. He was standing on a boat, holding a fish, a bandanna loosely tied around his head. Sun burnt. Young, almost anonymous.

Looking back, I can see that I was painting him in a kind of threshold, before the roles, before the weight of family. But at the time I wasn’t thinking about liminality or symbolism. I was just a grieving teenager trying to understand what happened. When I saw the look on my family’s faces, I recognised the power art can hold. It wasn’t just about likeness. It was about returning him to us, and also letting him exist outside of us. It was the first time I understood that art could hold something too large for language and too large to carry alone.

In year 11, I took a creative writing class and wrote about the day I found out he had died. That felt different again . It felt real in a way I hadn’t experienced before, tangible. I saw myself inside the words. I felt myself inside them. It rocked me. I’ve reread that piece recently and it’s as though I’m snapped back in time. The body memory returns. The room. The shock. The smell. It’s still there, intact inside the language. That was the first time I understood that creating something could preserve a moment so completely, not just describe it, but hold it.

At the end of year 10, I put on my own exhibition. I filled the space with my drawings and paintings. I remember how incredible it felt to invite people into my world, not just to show them what I could do, but to let them see how I saw. Pride, for me, has always been tied to connection. It’s never been about skill. It’s been about recognition, of something true.

The palettes you choose have a soft, delicacy to them. Yet the finished works are always breathtakingly powerful. How do you find balance between the elusive and the real?

I’m very conscious of that tension in my practice, the contradiction between what appears gentle and what is actually immense. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced an emotion in isolation. There is always something else woven through it. Even joy carries ache. Grief often holds relief. Every feeling I’ve ever had has carried another inside it. So when I paint, I don’t try to resolve that duality, I let it sit. The softness in the palette isn’t about fragility, it’s about access. It draws you in. But once you’re there, the work can hold something heavier. Something more bodily. More real. I paint from my honest state at the time, if something feels elusive, I allow it to remain partially obscured. If something feels raw, I let it press forward. The balance isn’t calculated, it comes from trusting that both can exist at once. Because they always do.

When your daughter is old enough to understand, how will you explain why you paint?

Having grown up around me making every day, my hope is that she’ll know without needing to ask. But if she does ask, I’ll tell her this. Painting is how I live. It isn’t just the moment my brush touches the canvas. It’s the noticing. The documenting. The questioning. The listening. The quiet collating of what it feels like to be here. Humans have always made art. It’s how we understand our time. How we express what can’t be neatly said, how we navigate grief and joy and change. How we connect to each other across distance. It’s also one way of keeping our hands busy, a quiet remedy inherited from our grandmothers. Women have always worked with their hands while carrying the weight of a household, a body, a grief. Sewing, mending, kneading, stitching, tending. Making as a way of steadying the nervous system, a medicine. Painting feels like it belongs to that lineage too. For me, painting isn’t a decision I make, it’s a way of being. And it’s something my daughter will have witnessed long before she has the words for it. 

@loraleejadeartist