Biography & Artist Statement
Hannah Jordan is an artist from Cleveland, Ohio, who works primarily in collage and printmaking. She received a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Ohio State University in 2021. Her work has been shown and sold in various galleries, primarily in Columbus, Ohio, including a solo exhibition at Skylab Gallery in 2024. During her time in Columbus, Hannah was also awarded a Greater Columbus Arts Council Funds for Artists Grant and completed a fellowship at Columbus Printed Arts Center. Hannah currently resides in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she is an MFA Printmaking Candidate at the University of Tennessee.
An ideal is a singularity that is replicated exactly across popular culture. By continuously repeating an ideal with differing variables, the ideal is dismantled through multiplicity. My practice uses this theory to re-examine Renaissance, Baroque, and Impressionist canonical artists through a feminine lens to contribute my experience to the intersectional codex of contemporary figurative art. I create repetitive canvas collages of idealized representations of women, most notably the three graces motif, in Arcadian landscapes using hand-cut acetate stencils. The Arcadian landscape provides a utopian commonplace for the female figures to reside in, which could not exist in the contemporary world due to industrialization and the privatization of land. By merging figure and ground through color and pattern, the women within the collage dissolve into the landscape and achieve a state of bliss. Imagery generated from the collages is then used to create printed works on paper that both enhances the fusion of figure and ground by flattening the image and multiplies the quantity of variations to further dismantle the original ideal.
Adornment, patterned textiles, and non-masculine colors have historically been used to devalue women and encourage complacency. Drawing influence from the Pattern and Decoration Movement principles and artists such as Miriam Schapiro, I use color and pattern to celebrate feminine aesthetics and reclaim the relationship between decoration and femininity. My feminine identity is incorporated into the work by gathering patterns connected to my mother and myself as well as found patterns that I resonate with. Additionally, the repetitive craft practice of pattern making mechanically relates to forms of “women’s work” such as tatting, knitting, or weaving and provides a sense of bliss for me as the maker. Through repetition, color, and pattern, I collage my interpretations of femininity to represent the female form in a landscape free from ideals.