Carol Jourdan

Description

My work begins on the ground.

It begins with foraging—fallen leaves, plants and petals, rusted metals, soils and bark. Materials gathered not by design but by attention: what the season offers, what the place releases, what would otherwise go unnoticed underfoot.

Materials boiled down to colour, metals left to oxidise, water carrying what the earth releases. The inks I make are unstable by nature. They stain, bloom, crystallise, settle. They resist being fixed, frozen once dried. Their behaviour becomes a collaborator—gravity, heat, time and chemical reactions shaping the surface alongside my hand.

Looking closely becomes a way of understanding.

Macro photography and microscopy expose the secretive, internal life of the material—a life usually hidden in minuscule detail, overlooked in favour of the image. Scale collapses. The surface opens into a whole new minute universe. Cracks form like dried riverbeds. Fields of colour resemble aerial landscapes or cosmic atmospheres. The crystalline structures of copper salts look like nothing so much as constellations.

The minute echoes the vast. A sublime lives not only in mountains or open skies but in the behaviour of matter—in the quiet drama of colours transforming, in the unpredictable way two inks react to each other, in the life that continues on the surface long after the brush has lifted.

What appears as a painting is not just an image made by the artist, but a record of collaboration: between intention and material, between control and release, between earth, water, time and touch. The painter's role is not to master the material but to create the conditions in which it can speak.

The Inks

The inks used in these works are made rather than bought. Source materials are gathered from local environments such: as my home garden and pavements, kitchen scraps, and the university metalwork shop and a few from my homeland of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Copper scraps, rust, acorn caps, oak husks, pine cones, red cabbage, hibiscus, staples removed from canvases, onion skins, avocado pits and skins, soils, bark, and fallen petals. My palette is shaped by place, season, and availability rather than predetermined colour outcomes.

Colour is extracted through soaking, simmering or boiling, with processes depending on the material and times ranging from hours to several weeks. The resulting liquid inks may be modified using household acids, alkalis, or metal salts to shift their chemistry: vinegar to brink out pink hues, baking soda or lye bring green hues, alum to intensify, iron to darken toward deep greys and blacks. More often, inks are left raw, their pH modified directly in the painting, allowing reactions to occur on the surface itself.

Unlike commercial paints, these inks do not behave uniformly. No two batches are identical. Organic source materials vary by season, soil, and age; water chemistry differs between recipes; even a residue left in a pan from a previous session can alter a colour. While some ink-makers take scientific precautions to minimise these variables as far as possible, I choose to see them as part of the work’s material agency. The unexpected result of an added modifier, an ink left too long on the heat, two colours meeting unpredictably on a wet surface: these are not failures but events, carrying information about the material's own nature.

These inks are also subject to change over time. They may fade, deepen, or shift in response to light and air. Rather than treating this as a limitation, the work embraces it: the painting continues to live after it leaves the studio, a record not just of how the inks were applied, but of how they behave across time.