JODRDAN CORDER-SWANSON

Self Directed Residency, October 2022

How was your time at Patio Press beneficial (or not?)  for your practice post-graduation?

I felt  intimidated at the start of the solo residency since this was my first attempt at creating work post-graduation and it had been a very long time since making something that wasn't for school. Post-graduation I initially focused my energy on the parts of my practice that could be job-based skills or curation-based elements did not leave any space or time for actual making and creating. 

 It was really exciting to feel like I was learning from myself for the first time in a while. I had started with a clear course of action for my time at Patio Press, similar to how I would have approached a course project, but as I worked I felt my plan wasn’t leading to pieces I really connected with. I found myself altering my approach and working in a way that built off of what I had learned or created the previous day in the studio. I tried letting each day feed into the next, seeing what the body of prints was lacking or what particular textures I had enjoyed from the previous printing day, that I could bring forward. This way of working was new to me, and different from how I had spent my studio time while in university.My time at Patio Press was a healthy learning experience in how to keep the creation part of my practice active and still growing post-gradution. 

How have the restrictions of working in a small DIY space, on a small press impacted your process or subject matter?

 Typically I work very big, however large the press bed is I find a way to fill it up and make one large print. I didn't think to make the end result of the work smaller but I do believe having a different-sized press than what I have worked on previously made me rethink how I could go about constructing my work. When working with a smaller press I used more of a collage-like process in how I approached it and the way in which I constructed the images on the press bed, using a lot of layering and picking which parts of the images would be broken up and divided onto various pieces of paper and fabric. 

The DIY drying system of hanging the prints in front of the window, instead of laying them flat on a drying rack, let me admire how they worked with natural light in a way I had not planned. I began looking at my prints with ideas of windows, framing, shadows and light being integral elements of how the finial pieces would function. 

Additionally laying the prints out and drying them on the table unintentionally helped me see them together in different configurations than how I would have typically approached assembling them. While I placed them on the table I would put a sheet of Plexi glass down and arrange as many tiny prints as I could onto a sheet of Plexi to avoid getting ink on the table. This led to me playing around with how the prints interacted with the plexi and seeing the glass as another layer of the of the work, which gave it much more dimension than plain paper ever could have. 

At the end of the process I was fortunate to have created a number of finished pieces which are all untitled for now, except for the green pieces which is called Nest. 

Materials: a variety of papers and cloth,  glass or plexiglass (depending on the piece), cheesecloth,  string