Meet Jordan Clarke, a Curator, workshop facilitator and image maker based in Hackney, East London.
Jordan’s practice is often centred around and founded in community, play and access - making exhibitions, workshops and showcases not just visually appealing but as accessible as possible to experience and take part in. Curation has become more of a collaborative and inclusive practice for Jordan which blends seamlessly into her workshop facilitation. She encourages others, whether practitioners or not, to create and make for the sake of play and having fun. This feeds the intention to make art not just an outlet but an integrated way of expression. This also hopes to bridge the gap between those who feel outside of the creative community and open a path for everyone.
Jordan has just curated and hosted her third show as of May this year, which was in East London’s Hackney Gallery. ‘Home is where the Art is’ was the debut show for multi-disciplinary emerging artist and musician Tanya Galia as well as Jordan’s curatorial/press release writing. Clarke has also held craft workshops for the Barbican Centre in the last year and is currently a workshop facilitator in the educations team for October gallery.
When not working with artists and the public, Jordan investigates our need for preservation, sentimentality and alternative archival practices through her image making and research. Time and its literal manifestation in photography also serves as a central point for most of her visual work. Creative writing such as transcribing exhibitions and pieces are too part of her personal practice, which is shared on her social platforms.
We spoke to Jordan about her career so far, using play as a learning tool, the need for accessible language in the art world and more…
To start with, I'd love to know what brought you into the world of curation.
I've been telling the story so much recently that the more I tell it, the more my attitude towards it is shifting, because I always say that I got into curation as a joke. I dropped out of uni for photography in 2018, a year and a half into my course, even though photography was what I was always interested in. I've always had that as my personal practice and I knew I never wanted to go to school for it, but I tried anyway and it was just such a Flop-tropica (flop) -in a way- of an experience that I ended up leaving and I got really burnt out. So, as you do, I went into retail, and I was doing retail shit for a long time. Though on this platform, The Dots - I'm sure you've heard of it, it's like creative LinkedIn - I was like “ if I’m going to use this space, what am I going to put myself as?” Because I'm not a photographer and I don't have any other practice. So I just said curator, because I was like, ah, let's just see. No one comes on here, nobody cares, it's not that deep. I kind of did it as a let's just leave it there because no one's going to challenge me on it sort of thing.
Then four years later, I got a really random message from someone who had a show coming up in two weeks and needed someone to curate it. Two things crossed my mind: One, I didn't even know anybody used this freaking app! Two, I didn't know someone would actually take me seriously. I had no work on there, no examples, nothing. But I was like, okay, cool, sure. So I did that show in 2022, a community-based project in north London. There were 12 hung artists and around the same number of performing artists. I got the work on the day of the exhibition and I had to hang it that morning so I had never seen the practices. I had also never spoken to the artists, and I had to just put the show on. That was really great though.
A year later, I got a call from a random number and it happened to be an artist I hung from the year before. And he was like “I remember you hanging my work and I remember the care that you took"- which was a pleasant surprise and la la la. He was now doing a showcase that following year with his creative organisation. He asked “Could you curate it?” and it was really funny, at that point, I’d still not thought about curation seriously, but I thought I’d give it a go because I enjoyed the last one. I did his show last June, a creative networking event as well as an exhibition, and hung 8 artists. I had two months to work with the artists so that was my first time liaising with creatives, working with them towards their deadlines, supporting them, providing physical and digital support as they were doing the work and encouraging them with emotional and mental support. A lot of these artists had full-time jobs and one of them was a parent. So it was like, you can come and talk to me if you're stressed or you're uncomfortable or you have queries so that they feel comfortable enough to keep going towards our deadline. And then obviously I designed the visual experience and did the show.
More recently now with these experiences under my belt, I knew that I wanted to do my first solo show this year, and I was like, right, I'm taking this curator shit seriously now. The artist I called was one of the artists I hung last year because I knew from when I saw her practice, it was her that I was going to do my first solo show with. So, yeah, like seven months later, I was like, if you're up for it, I have a space that I have always wanted to do a show in. She said yes and then we spent four months building this solo show. ‘Home is where the Art is’ was born and was held in Hackney Gallery, the space that since it opened two years ago, I said, I will do a show there. I have to see my name in the orange text on the glass - and here I am as a curator.
That's so incredible, especially the story of how you first got into curation. That's
in equal parts hilarious and inspiring. What was that initial learning curve like? What were your first steps into learning about the role once you got that first text message asking to curate their show?
I think my approach to my curatorial practice is the same now as it was then, which was to just get into the space and learn on my feet there and then. My basic idea of a curator, when I wrote that title four years prior, was someone who hangs work in a space and designs which work goes next to each other, but that was all I knew about the role. Because I had such a short turnaround when I did the first show and I was meeting that work on that day, it was literally just a case of feeling, where does this work go? Where am I going to put it? How am I going to group them? And based on the brief meetings I had with the artists that morning where I could learn who they were a little bit and what their energy was like, I infused that into my visual decisions.
Then the next year, I was embodying the curatorial role a bit more. It wasn’t just a case of how do I feel like these works sit together, but what is my visual language and how do I want to bring that into this show. I wanted it to be more clear that it's Jordan who put this work together, that there's a theme of what I'm doing and it's not just work being put on the wall. So I started to develop my own visual language, but again, that was on my feet of just intuitively feeling it. I had a couple of weeks to hang the work, so I could really be in the venue. It was a very spiritual space as well, coincidentally, so I could be quite meditative with it and I was actively more intentional.
With this third show, I’d found my visual language. I knew what I wanted to work with and what space I wanted to create now. I know that I love painting in particular, as a practice. I love very particular styles of painting and colour palettes and I‘ve started exploring those visual elements and how to put them in a space. I want to get that vibrancy, that creativeness, that almost like wacky randomness, that element of play and intimacy into the space, because a lot of the artists that I'm interested in working with have a practice that's very intimate, very spiritual and intuitive. I have to meet it with the same energy. So that was something I needed to learn, was to trust my visual eye and my innate skills to see something and let that inform the design of the space.
Would you say that curation has informed your own practice as an artist yourself?
I would say yes because even yesterday I went to a private view for an artist that I've been obsessed with since I found her work in March (Ksenia Dermenzhi) and immediately I wanted to not just write about the show but respond. I never had a drawing practice before - I never really pushed on my painting practice either. But this year, to inform my curatorial practice, I’ve been drawing more, using new materials and experimenting with colours that I never would have in my personal practice. This then reinforces what work I like to see when I visit shows and what artists I like to engage with, which then inspires shows that I want to put on as a curator, or themes or styles that I want to infuse into my own exhibitions. So they are definitely feeding each other.
You touched on it a little bit before there, but you've described your work as centred around community, play and access. Could you take me through what that means for you and your work?
So with Curation, which is something that is generally quite solitary, I make sure to ask the artists a lot of questions, like how do you feel about this space? How do you feel about where stuff would be? When I'm making a decision on the wall or in my curatorial plans, they're with me every step of the way. It becomes more of a collaboration and a community-based practice because it's about us enjoying this exhibition. It's not about me creating something pretty out of someone else’s work every time I put on a show. My biggest desire is to celebrate the artists and the works, which cannot be done by just me clapping for them and creating something beautiful. It's about them feeling like they're truly represented as well, and then the public feeling like they have a space to engage with whatever we’re showing. So it then becomes a community-type thing.
Also last year, I finished and completed my year-long programme with the Barbican as a young visual artist. My initial desire when I started that programme was to work on my image making, because, as I told you, I worked with photography. Specifically I like to work with film photography and physical film. I like to play with the science of photography and all of that sort of stuff. When I joined the programme though, I quickly realised there's no space for me to practise my own work here and there are no facilities for me to do that. So I started facilitation. I said that I’d host a workshop instead as my final-year gift to the program. In doing that, I realised that I'm interested in creating a proper community-based practice that would reach all what I do.
Play is also a huge part of getting people to engage with work. As a child, the first way you learn anything is through play, even if that's your motor skills. Learning literacy, numeracy and then visual arts is all through play. A lot of young people, but mostly adults and especially non-practitioners, don't have an element of play in their life, in their jobs or practice. So creating spaces where people can join in, whether that be through talking only or through activities and interactive pieces, can get them into not just seeing something that they enjoy, but being a part of something that they enjoy - which then links to access. I want to create things that are accessible for as many people as possible and open up spaces that they otherwise might have felt excluded from.
Art can feel very like, I don't get that, I can't paint or I can't draw, so I can't engage with this. But of course, everyone can! It's just colours and shapes, so come and make some colours and shapes, or talk to me about what colours and shapes that you like. I don't always have activities at events. There are moments when I'll talk to a guest and be like, "So what do you like about this space? Or what don't you like about this space or what's in it?" And if they're saying, I don't know, I don’t know, because I don't know how to engage, I'm like, okay, "So what colours are interesting? What colours are you not interested in?" And it gets people to start playing with visual cues in their mind.
They might look at me as a curator and think I will have a different opinion or a more distinguished opinion about art because I spend all my time consuming it and working with it. Though, if I pick a subject that's accessible, like just looking at this space, looking at things or engaging with base elements, it makes it a level playing field. We’re all on the same level in this space - there's no hierarchy here.
What other changes would you like to see in the art industry kind of going forward?
How we communicate about arts and what language we use is really important. A lot of people tell me that I'm quite eloquent or I know how to speak well which is great. I can use the jargon but I’ve been told it’s more of my whimsical, airy-fairy and softer way of talking that connects to people. I know how to speak in a way that is interesting and can be formal when it needs to be, but also quite accessible. But there isn't much space for my type of writing or how I speak in a traditional art space. I can do the essays if I need to, I can do the traditional press writing if I need to, but then most people will switch off from that. So I have found with the content that I've been making, writing about shows, I literally write how I speak. It's as if you're listening to me talk, and it's been transcribed. It's not formative in any sort of way.
I would love for more opportunities for alternative writing practices to come into the art world, because when you're trying to write about something that's completely abstract and unique and sits in its own world, how can you use a universal ostracising language for that?
Often, writing in the art world will use words that most people don't hear, and you're trying to piece them together in silly ways to sound a certain way. No one cares! It's a pretty painting. It's a gorgeous picture. Just talk about it in accessible language, you know, like, it's not that deep. The way you're talking about this collection of work from the 1930s, you're also talking about a collection of work from 2018. You can't use the same language, you have to use something else.
Also, not everybody can access visual cues the same way. People don't even perceive colour the same way on a basic level. What's orange to me is not orange to someone else. So just relying on the visuals of the artwork to be the thing that explains anything is not enough. There are people who need words. There are people who need alternative connection routes. I think if writing was changed, that would make a huge difference.
I want people to just give their opinions, to share. Do you like this? Yeah. Why do you like it? Why is it here? We should have the space to talk about art like that, rather than in this very cold, third-person demeanour. I hate that.
If you enjoyed this conversation with Jordan, make sure to check out our other Artist Spotlight interviews over on https://www.brushwrk.co.uk/blog and whilst you’re there, why not have a look through all of the fantastic art we have for sale from emerging artists? Pop into the website to see what catches your eye…
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