About Jordan Grace Owens

My work explores a fluidity of physical form through fragmented figures and shifting, relational abstract shapes. Using multiple mediums including paint, sewn canvas, and cut wood, I’m interested in exploring design, materiality, and the intersections between two-dimensional and three-dimensional planes.

My interest in figure builds upon my decade-long career in portrait illustration. After having two children and shifting into the challenging new paradigm of artist/young mother, I began focusing on studio work in earnest. I was inspired by the surreality of my own changing physical form, as well as the intensely bodily relationships between myself and my young children. In my work, undulating organic shapes suggest the unreliability of physical boundaries. Shapes press against, fold around, and intersect one another, reflecting the complexity of maternal autonomy. The negative spaces created by these relationships are treated with as much importance as the shapes themselves. In further effort to explore a fluidity of form, much of my work straddles categories of two- and three-dimensions. My wooden paper dolls are primarily two-dimensional, but they are playfully inserted into a viewer’s three-dimensional space, suggesting the potential for actual physical movement and even inviting viewers to touch and interact with them. It’s important to me to imbue a sense of movement into all of my compositions, creating undercurrents of temporality and flux.