Using drawing and painting alongside clay, Donahue explores 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. Her practice navigates between the public and private, offering parts of her biography and everyday life to viewers while remaining abstracted or distanced through the pareddown lines forming the figures in her work. In this work, Donahue balances the joy and humor from parenthood with what she calls the “abject discomfort and occasional humiliation” of the art and wider world forever associating her body with her children—much like a modern Madonna

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