Maureen Jordan Kent, United Kingdom

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I am a Northern Irish artist currently based in Kent Using found objects and recycled materials, I tend to work in response to specific sites, indoors and out. Reclaimed materials often retain the traces or scars of their former use but can be given a new energy charge when redeemed. I sometimes combine these with materials held to have more value or impact, such as stained glass, itself recycled

I am an award-winning artist (Ashurst Emerging Sculptor 2017) following a career including working with many artists in a variety of contexts including 12 years in Arts Council England and supporting Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year in 2008. In 2019 I set up a live-work space, Bouverie Studio in Folkestone. I often use reclaimed materials and found objects in my work and consider oral history, photographs and sound also to be ‘reclaimed’ material.

A background in theatre influences my practice: objects are like props with memories embedded: discarded beds speak of fantasies or nightmares, old roof tiles become a 'miraculous' river of glass flowing into light; vintage milk bottles recall a more innocent time.

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 to a time and place.

PLACE: physical space, cultural identity, territory, perception, emotional connection. NARRATIVES: stories, histories, mythologies, beliefs, poetry TRANSFORMATION: altered objects, the sacred/banal, metamorphosis.