Carol Jordan – Trauma in Collaboration with Trish Cavanagh
An expressive artist, Carol Jordan works across numerous disciplines including ceramics, weaving, sculpture, painting, printmaking with photography often being a prominent part of her installations. A searing poet and a storyteller, Jordan is no stranger to performing in Bray and includes projections of her artworks as companion pieces to her poems.
Equipped with a background in psychology, Jordan is drawn to exploring and expressing difficult emotional states and does not shy away from themes such as anxiety, dementia and death. Arising from her political activism, Jordan’s art has a socio-political dimension- as in her Tuam babies installation, a savage yet poignant indictment of the Mother and Baby Home.
This exhibition addresses the experience of cancer and its devastating impact on the emotions. Arising from the breast-cancer journey of Carol Jordan’s close friend and artist, Trish Cavanagh, the stark black and white photographs are co-creations and testify to her courage and artistry in embodying her emotions for the camera.
Jordan likes to work ritually, choosing hairs, shorn at the onset of chemotherapy to over-sew her image of Trish’s mastectomy scar. The more recent large-scale sculptural works address states of associated anxiety, terror and dark-night -of -the-soul in an immersive way.
This is a highly charged exhibition and aims to evoke a strong emotional response.