In artist Jordan Sheridan’s recent work “Illusory Stasis,” the viewer navigates a maze-like fixture that leads to a glowing center. Hanging inside is a cocoon-like bulb, illuminating out. It is welcoming, but eerie or “paranormal” as the artist describes.
The work is the latest of Sheridan’s that focuses on the topic of motherhood and identities around that. This work is the mother and artist’s most specific work to date, targeting the idea of a healthy balance in one’s work and personal lives.
“It’s about the sweet spot that doesn’t exist, the unicorn,” Sheridan said. “Everyone kept telling me to find balance. It was meant to show it as otherworldly … you find this thing that doesn’t exist.”
The creation of the work came for the 701 CCA Prize finalist exhibition, which is ongoing until January. Prior to its creation, Sheridan had solely planned her own wedding and, upon return, had three weeks to create the piece for her work.
For an artist who works in mixed media installation pieces that sprawl in rooms, it was no small task. She worked for 18 hours a day for three weeks, she said, as she taught studio art in the art department at the University of South Carolina, and would then move to the gallery space.
“That was really, really hard, that was the hardest three weeks of my life,” she said.
Sheridan’s work paid off, though, as she won the 701 CCA Prize in November.
It results in a six-week, paid residency at the Columbia arts organization and gallery the 701 Center for Contemporary Art and a solo exhibition there highlighting their residency work. The award is in its sixth year and is focused on highlighting young artists, with those 40 and younger eligible. It is one of the only awards like it in Columbia.
The 701 CCA executive director Caitlin Bright, who was named in October and replaced artist and former director Michaela Pilar Brown, explained a jury selects the winner. Bright, who is not a jury member, said Sheridan’s “emotional content” likely stood out to the three-person committee.
“People are very attuned to messages conveyed and experiences had,” Bright said.
For Sheridan, “Illusory Stasis” is the continuation of a handful of pieces she’s done on the topic of motherhood, from installation works “The Mother” and “Enmeshed” (both also featured in different 701 CCA exhibitions) to her prior paintings, some of which she made in collaboration with her son when he was very young.
It’s also a quick ascent for the artist who didn’t receive her master of fine arts from USC until 2021. She’s received other accolades as well. In 2021, she was one of five recipients for the S.C. Arts Commission’s Emerging Artist grant.
With “THE MOTHER”, Sheridan analyzed motherhood more broadly, focusing on the shifting relationship between her and her son. That, a mass of interweaving purple and blue webs, came about during her graduate education and was the result of her thesis work.
Her thesis advisor and USC associate professor Sara Schneckloth said she recalled when Sheridan came up with the idea to create an installation. Until that time, Sheridan had been working as a painter and was focused on similar themes around motherhood.
“You could tell her paintings, they were doing a lot, but there was still this extra dimensional she wanted to explore, quite literally,” Schneckloth said. “You could see what this could become. Her ideas, they come so quickly, they come massively. They come with a great sense of potential and being.”
In her final year of graduate school she showed Schneckloth an “expressive” and “frenetic” crayon drawing sketch of what she wanted to create. Schneckloth agreed and the result was “THE MOTHER,” which would later also be featured in 701 CCA’s Biennial exhibition, a survey of the top contemporary art in the state.
During that time at USC, Sheridan worked as an assistant to George Hetherington, an adjunct instructor and painter. He said her work’s originality stood out to him.
“As Jordan explored going in other directions and (is) succeeding in all of them,” he said. “The mores he works the better she gets, the more her originality blossoms.”
Sheridan’s focus on motherhood came on perhaps understandably: She was a single mother entering graduate school in Columbia — though she would meet her current partner early on, and she credits him with helping her manage the parenting with classwork.
Still, she found herself drawn to the topic and how it relates to her identity as a mother and artist.
“I think (my interest is) because being a mother is a large part of my life, it essentially is your life when you have young children,” she said. “It also is a way of examining who I am as an artist and a mother. … It’s this blurred line between who’s who, because I devote myself between the two.”
Editor’s note: Sheridan’s residency and solo exhibition will take place in the next fiscal year, 701 CCA executive director Caitlin Bright said.
