Award: Research & Development Grant
Discipline: Visual Arts
Project Collaborator(s):
Conceptually, the work questions the ways in which we divide, use, and share land, and how our borders (or lack thereof) determine our interactions with the land we inhabit. The zones in dispute affect the movement and identity of its inhabitants. How do individuals become “of one place” if the place is constantly in question? And how does an immigrant navigate through borders and does it affect their experience of assimilating a new place and identity?
Excerpt from Saskia Jordá’s R&D Grant application
Saskia Jorda’s “Disputed Territories – Disputed Bodies” is a new project series that explores “place identity” through the metaphor of the mapping of territorial disputes. Using mapping as the main visual language, Jorda seeks to build upon the themes of place and cultural identity that are increasingly central to her practice.
Conceptually, the work questions the ways in which we divide, use, and share land, and how our borders (or lack thereof) determine our interactions with the land we inhabit. As an immigrant herself, as well as a descendant of generations of immigrants, Jorda is interested in this transitory experience and the process of assimilation, how one becomes “of a place” and how one’s body interacts with its surroundings, physically, and culturally.
With the support of a Research and Development Grant Jorda will deepen the complexity of her maps and body-related works to create a more cohesive and multifaceted environment in which the body can have a stronger presence in the work and experience it as a transitional space.
Lineage
Coiled fibers. Detail with model.
Lineage intertwines connotations of ancestry, bloodlines, and points of connection resembling an extension of the body’s circulatory system: a map made of three-dimensional coiled lines interrupted by the human form – lines that connect and disconnect body, place, and the passage of time.
Photograph by William LeGoullon
Radius
Size: 12″ x 16″
Materials: Gouache, color pencil, ink, thread, vellum on paper.
Radius explores “place identity” through hatched lines and questions the ways in which we divide, use, and share land. Through alternating bands of color, this work questions how our borders (or lack thereof) determine our interactions with the land we inhabit. Radius is part of a new series, “Disputed Territories,” currently in development.
Saskia Jordá is an interdisciplinary artist working on site-specific installations, soft sculptures, and drawings. Her work has referenced the relationship between body and space, cultural identity, and mapping a sense of place since her undergraduate studies at Arizona State University and her graduate studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she earned her MFA. She has received various awards, including the Arlene and Morton Scult Contemporary Forum Award of the Phoenix Art Museum and an Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has exhibited widely within the U.S. and internationally, and is currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to her studio work, Saskia co-founded the Taliesin Artist Residency Program, which she directed from 2005-2017, and has been teaching Drawing and Textiles at college level since 2012.
