Terry Jordan

Terry Jordan is an artist, writer and musician who uses a multi-stage process to print from salvaged Vancouver Island wood species onto handmade and industrial paper, often combining them into character-driven and abstract collage.

I tend to lean a bit toward the abstract in most of my works-on-paper. Caricaturing the human as well as the landscape behind them in my collages; exaggerating both is a recipe for humour in the pieces. I like to think of a sense of place to begin. Somewhere I’ve been, even imagined. Some place that has affected me, is still inside me, that I let out to play while I try to create a character to set down (gently, or wildly) in that place, and embroider with paper the story the character wants to become. Printing tree rings is an act of storytelling, too. Or, more precisely, using ink to tell the tree’s story in order for it to be read on paper. In essence, you’re copying a book of natural history, a map of sorts. The beauty and shape of the rings, the inevitable accidents that break up the symmetry of the curves.