Jordan Herregraven

Built on a foundation of reoccurring and often archetypal imagery, Jordan Herregraven’s practice reflects the natural world through an uncanny lens. Utilizing various mediums and crafts such as woodcarving and etching he reveals a mythology filled with fragments and evolutions, memories and possible futures. Layers of fabric skins and wooden bodies contort and meld, colours and patterns reach for order and reason while lengths of thread seek to connect ideas or hold tension like nerves and muscles. The personal body extends outward into an imagined one as felt through the senses; a mortal form holding collective histories, traumas and revelations of the unconscious mind. Remaining enigmatic, Herregraven’s work reveals itself through layers, often mirroring the ceaseless fecundity that lies at the centre of nature and the focus of much of his practice. This connection to nature is examined through forms and material use by retracing humanity's molding of the environment into aesthetic crafts and symbols, eventually drawing into question what we value, as a society and as a complex individual full of dreams, thoughts and ceremony. In recent series, Herregraven has focused on the effects of climate change and extreme capitalism, framing cycles of life and death in further abstracted forms and situations. The weirdness of the natural world and human imagination blend to reflect the transformations of our contemporary world where our ecosystems, and the bodies that constitute their functioning, are at stake.