Jordan Davey-Emms

Porous features (getting closer)

J Davey Emms Install Front

My practice deals with worked surfaces and touch, walking and absorption. I play with solids and seepage; wet contact, softened bodies, and crusty-nesses. Making and walking are a means for me to engage with materials and material culture, and to process moments of connection.This project has been primarily driven by the desire to connect with place. 

The world is a bundle of material in process. In my work, playcentre-style processes and materials merge with outdoor surface practices such as patching, filling, smoothing over, embedding stones, applying mortar and adding texture. I mix playdough, apply layers, thicken edges, and press into matter. 



Domestic renovation, landscaping, road works, pavements, and boundary walls inscribe otherwise blank spaces. Through them, my body registers limits, and the presence of material and process. Hard bits and worked surfaces are embedded with touch and time. Build up, division, and traces of process bring the faces (and bodies) of the material world closer to my body. Space gets broken up and gains texture. A mutual filtration occurs between body and environment in place making. Boundaries become porous. Encounters with place merge and stack together.

J Davey Emms Detail Cardboard
J Davey Emms Detail Embedded Stones
J Davey Emms Detail Carpet Stack

         Surface         ~live material~

         |                   / 

         |                 / 

         |  ---------- / 

                 | 

                 | 

              Body 

                                       Gaps, openness --------- jumping, connection    

                                            |              \    

                                            |                \ 

                                      porosity        ecology, unclosed relationships    

                                                           continuation

 

I have been working with edges and surfaces as sites of exchange, accumulation, and connection. I think of body and place relationships as being connected to aggregate, in which parts mix but retain particularities. Pieces touch. Fragments of place, and the things I make, overlay and cross-feed. These things, through which I process ideas of place, body, and materiality, are continually adapted, touched, un-fixed. They are bound up in a playful ecology and arranged in emergent clusters. My surfaces are unsealed. Fragments talk across gaps, with bodies, and as bodies. They come together; an open mass of recast relationships, becoming.

J Davey Emms Detail Foam Topped Brick
J Davey Emms Install Side

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