Taking its subtitle from Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, The Brood transforms the play’s wartime family into a compressed mass of interlocking bodies, straining limbs, and outstretched hands. Across the painting’s large square field, ashen flesh and passages of black, bruised red, and ochre bind the figures together while suggesting both protection and collapse. Parkinson draws Brecht’s account of a mother who survives war while losing her children into her own enduring concerns with motherhood, violence, and the impossible effort to shelter a family from history.