shelley jordon

Gouache on birds-eye maple paper installation, 2011

I became interested in the unique psychological place where the roles of mothers and daughters intersect when my own daughter turned eleven. I invited friends and their daughter’s to pose for me and to share their observances and reflections about their own experiences as both mother and daughter. These large scale graphite drawings, drawn from life, were completed during those 1 1/2 to 2 hour sessions. *A clip of the soundtrack with interviews reflecting on motherhood/daughterhood is posted on my animation page. This is an ongoing project.

This series of mixed media works on paper explores the fragility of the human body and the nature of physical and emotional memory.

An Earthquake devastated the historic hilltop town of L’Aquila while I was a visiting artist at the American Acdemy in Rome in April, 2009. The tremors and aftershocks of the 5.8 earthquake whose epicenter was 70 miles east of Rome, caused my top floor studio/loft to sway back and forth, awakening me at 3:00AM, and panicking me for days to come. One hundred and fifty people in the Abruzzo region died and 50,000 were left homeless. Terremoto(earthquake in Italian) is a series of works on paper and an animation, which examine how easily shattered the illusion of safety, can be. Terremoto can be viewed on the animation page

The cardboard box filled with stuffed animals got waylaid to my studio on its way to Goodwill. I was struck by the symbolism of my eleven year-old’s readiness to give up these sources of comfort at this particular junction between childhood and adolescence and was drawn to the stuffed animals themselves. While drawing and painting them I began to think of them as metaphors for innocence, vulnerability, and risk. Eventually their images also found there way into two animated pieces, “Angry Gorilla “ and “Disappearing Chihuahua”.