Jordan
McKenzie

Creating is never an act of clarity or distillation but a squishing together of disparate elements; queerness, class, found junk, glitter, words, politics, poetry and rage. It’s this fizzy alchemy that I
look for in my work, and this can as easily come from picking through rubbish and day dreaming as consciously ‘making’. The space of the canvas becomes an active place, painting is akin to
becoming a material flaneur, seeking vernacular associations, assembling compositions made from journeying through the ‘outside’ of the studio and onto the inside of painting. Indeed, I’ve long ago given up treating my ‘place’ of work as a studio but rather a test bed of dirt and discoveries, a swirling whirlpool that occasionally rests before moving on.

I actively use my (late) diagnosis of ADHD as a methodology, seeking (neuro)-diverse connections, working on many paintings at a time and searching for the cross pollinations of ideas and materials. There is an insistence that the paintings exist beyond a repetitive visual language, the authorial signature of established themes and coherent recognisable styles. Enquiry moves upwards, downwards, through, with and against the works that are produced, conclusions left open, ideas hastily explored and then moved on from, eddies of interest that eventually peter out and shoot off in new directions. It’s in the act of painting itself, which I see as a performative process, where the disparate areas of my practice unite, these material methodologies and actions
binding meaning together.

My materials ARE my community of practice