Redux Contemporary Art Center this month presents Interwoven, a solo exhibition from Columbia-based artist Jordan Sheridan, who works in textile installation and oil painting. This exhibit will transform the Redux galleries with a new series of paintings along with a large, crocheted and light-based installation titled, “The Mother.”
Interwoven is the result of Sheridan imagining the maternal experience as an enveloping, polymorphous mass that is ever-stretching, fracturing and shifting. The work documents and aestheticizes her personal experience as a mother.
Through painting and installation, she communicates the paradox of feeling both overwhelmed and spellbound as a mother — reconnecting the fragmented pieces of her identity while the boundaries between herself and her children are often blurred.
In addition to the exhibition running March 31-May 20, Sheridan will host a free community workshop from 1-4 p.m. April 1 at Redux, teaching participants how to cut and crochet a single chain with donated fabric. Everyone will then create chains of material to hang on a wooden frame suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. Participants are encouraged, but not required, to bring old materials like T-shirts, towels and sheets to use.
This latest exhibit demonstrates a shift in Sheridan’s artistic practice, which happened in 2017 when she gave birth to her son, Samuel. Sheridan, who was born in northeastern Arkansas, was pursuing a master’s degree in fine art at the University of South Carolina when Sam was very young.
This profound experience caused her work to organically shift to include her understanding of her new role as a mother. This pushed her from working primarily in painting into 3D artmaking via large-scale textile installations.
“When I was working on what I was going to do for my thesis, I remember my committee saying I had too many ideas going on. So they just said point blank, ‘What’s the most important thing in the world to you?’ And I said, ‘My son.’ It was an easy question. And so that’s kind of when it started to shift into thinking about how I can make work about my experience as a mother.
“I made probably 30 paintings in a couple of months trying to express motherhood, and I just didn’t feel like it was really capturing it. It just wasn’t enough. I felt like I needed to wrap the viewer inside of my painting somehow. And that’s when I started to look into installation and 3D work.”
Sheridan’s studio practice unites painting, sculpture and installation. She said each installation evolves, as does her experience of motherhood.
“Every time I hang the work, it looks different than the time before. I really like that part of it, how it shifts, because motherhood is constantly shifting and evolving.”
The upcoming show at Redux especially exemplifies the idea of change as the only constant. The show was intended to revolve around light and the “ephemeral quality of motherhood” but has shifted into a darker tone since Sheridan experienced a death in her family.
“This show was kind of intended to be a certain way, and then something shifted in my life, and now it’s gone in a different direction. A few weeks ago, my 20-year-old nephew, who I’m really close to, passed away. So the paintings have started to shift from these soft, light-filled paintings into kind of dark, violent ones. My relationship with him also informs the idea of motherhood for me. He was my nephew — it’s still this role of caretaking. But it also still relates to motherhood because it’s not all light.
“There are instances where it’s incredibly hard, and especially moments like losing someone that you’re kind of a caretaker of.”
Sheridan is currently a full-time instructor at the University of South Carolina, where she has taught painting courses since 2021. She said the way she approaches creating and installing her textile work is similar to painting.
“It reminds me a lot of painting because it’s really intuitive — you’re kind of laying a brushstroke, moving colors. And I think the closer you get to the installation, the more you get to see how much material has been crocheted together. It took me a full year of maybe six to eight hours every night crocheting. And that’s something also that kind of helped me to make artwork as a mother, because you can crochet with your child right next to you.”
Both the fabrication and installation of the textile work is very labor-intensive, Sheridan said.
“I think it connects to motherhood in that it’s this sort of invisible and never-ending labor.”
Redux will host an opening reception for Interwoven from
5-8 p.m. March 31.
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