Carol
Jourdan
Born in Brazil, moving to the UK at age 12, the change between these places and their landscapes both physically and in my work. My practice centres on making my own inks from foraged and repurposed materials – rusty metal, plants, flowers – to create paintings that physically carry traces of the environment. These works become metaphors for the fragility of our existing landscapes, echoing their transient beauty and inherent vulnerability. The inks I make are unstable, imperfect and alive. Small shifts in a recipe, a trace of pollution, or a change in pH can completely transform a colour; things can sour, separate or bloom unexpectedly. I’m drawn to this unpredictability as it mirrors ecological precocity and resists the fantasy of full control. Making them slows me down to pay attention to what is usually overlooked – rust on a fence, the weeds at the edge of a pavement – and treat them as starting points for experiments and images. In the studio I work with fluid compositions that allow the inks to move, pool and collide on the surface, sometimes on many small pieces that assemble into larger constellations where colours flood into each other. I also use macro photography to magnify tiny details of the dried and drying inks, revealing other-worldly landscapes and micro-sublime spaces inside the work. I hope the pieces invite viewers into a similar kind of close looking – a moment of reflection on material, time and the more-than-human world we’re entangled with.