Palo Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Lily Burgess’s debut exhibition Beginning of the Birth Pangs. Featuring thirteen new prints all taken without the past year illuminating the many ways the human spirit searches for sanctity amid pain through ritual. Drawing inspiration from Francesca Woodman and David Lynch, Burgess’s ongoing series, begun nearly five years ago, captures the isolation of trauma alongside an overwhelming desire to be cleansed of its weight.
Lily Burgess’s newest series illuminates the many ways the human spirit searches for sanctity amid pain. Drawing on ritual, iconography, and religious forms, Burgess grapples with salvation as something both desired and potentially withheld. Her portraits present the body as a vessel for prayer –“hands clasped, bodies writhing, seclusion, cleansings, grief, sex,” as Burgess describes. Working with film, she creates raw and intimate compositions that evoke curiosity and experimentation, questioning how we represent struggle and the longing for deliverance.
Raised in a Christian household, religion has remained a pervasive force in Burgess’s life, both positively and negatively. Its influence is evident not only conceptually but also aesthetically throughout her work: gothic typography, cross-like formations, and garments reminiscent of church attire in the American South. Central to the series is a reckoning with the body itself, its vulnerability, mortality, and capacity to bear both suffering and desire. This tension recalls the story of the Garden of Eden, where Eve’s consumption of the forbidden fruit reveals the flesh as a site of shame, sexuality, and self-consciousness. For Burgess, the body becomes a similarly charged terrain, carrying the weight of spiritual longing while exposing the fragility of human existence. In her early twenties, Burgess has already confronted profound experiences of trauma. Her artistic practice serves as a space of refuge and inquiry, where she searches for answers that may never come, attempting to understand what often feels incomprehensible.
The uncomfortable and strained positions of her subjects reflect the often invisible toll trauma takes on both body and mind. These figures represent the exhaustion of enduring pain that cannot be fully understood, yet must be faced each day. Within this suffering, however, Burgess uncovers the possibility of discovery. Pain becomes a site of vulnerability and revelation, something we can either turn away from or confront directly, a process she describes as “knowing thy nakedness.” The phrase evokes both spiritual exposure and the biblical awareness of the body that follows the Fall, linking personal trauma to broader questions of shame, embodiment, and redemption. These vignettes reach toward something greater, calling upon a force beyond self to illuminate a path forward, whether that path is marked by further suffering or not.
Beginning of the Birth Pangs opens with a celebratory reception with the artist on Friday, 10 July, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at Palo Gallery, located at 21 East 3rd Street, New York City.