Jordan Sheridan: The Mother

An MFA Thesis Exhibition

April 5 - 9, 2021

Jordan Sheridan is a graduating Master of Fine Arts student at the University of South Carolina and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at the College of Charleston in 2011. Sheridan has a three-year-old son, Samuel, who enjoys monster trucks and being outdoors. Her 2021 thesis exhibition, The Mother, is created in painting and textile installation and focuses on her identities of mother and artist.  

Artist Statement

I imagine the maternal experience as an enveloping, polymorphous mass that is ever stretching, fracturing, and shifting. This body of work documents, communicates, and aestheticizes my personal experience of being a mother to my young son, Samuel. Through painting and installation, I visually communicate the paradox of feeling both overwhelmed and spellbound as a mother, of reconnecting the fragmented pieces of my identity, while the boundaries between Samuel and myself are often blurred. My paintings and installation inform each other, the crocheted installation is a 3-dimensional extension of my painting practice with its own unique and deliberate mark making and form, its woven structure accosts and envelops the viewer to situate them in my position and identity as the mother.  My paintings are made through a close examination of the installation and how it exists and behaves in space.