Maureen Jordan MRSS

During a career in arts management I have worked with many artists in diverse contexts: touring theatre companies, university departments, EU projects and in the Arts Council of England. Whilst working with Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 I decided to focus exclusively on developing my own artistic practice. Since 2009 I have exhibited, attended residencies, completed an MA in Fine Art, was awarded the Ashurst Emerging Sculptor Prize in 2016 for 'Stains' and a judges' prize for 'Voix Celestes' in the 2023 Chaiya Art Awards exhibition in the Oxo Tower/Bargehouse.

I respond to specific sites or places, often using found objects including photographs, text, sound. Reclaimed materials can retain the scars and marks of their time, of their use and abuse. They can be given a new energy charge when combined with material considered to have more value or impact, such as stained glass, neon light, music, poetry. Within these contrasts lie the tensions between what we see and what we remember; the stories we are told about our histories and those we tell ourselves. It is this ‘contested territory’ that interests me most.

My background in theatre influences my approach. The objects I choose to work with are like props but with memory embedded: a discarded bedframe retains traces of fantasies and nightmares; vintage piano stools echo the ‘heavenly voices’ of birdsong; plastic shot glasses in sickly neon: 'happy hour' gone sour– the devil is in the detail.

The physical act of making is a renegotiation, a way of thinking, of reading the world and being more fully in it, and of bearing witness.

PLACE: physical space, cultural identity, territory, perception, emotional connection.

NARRATIVES: stories, histories, mythologies, beliefs.

TRANSFORMATION:  altered objects, the sacred/banal, metamorphosis.