Pod-casting
Nashville artist Patricia Jordan explores the aging process and finds within it cycles of death and rebirth
by Lisa Donovan
Whether you dread it or romanticize it, aging is a fact of life. Some people even look forward to their later years as a time when they can finally escape all the angst, frustration, desire and hyper-ambitiousness of youth. But if you’re a woman, you don’t get off easily with a minor midlife crisis involving fast cars, cigars and young ladies. No, women get hot flashes, night sweats, anxiety, leg cramps, thicker facial hair than we deserve—a sweet little interlude called menopause. Patricia Jordan does well representing this phenomenon in her current show at Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center on the Vanderbilt campus.
The setting is very apposite to her work. The gallery is more of a living room, set with comfortable couches, handmade pillows, homey lamps and bookshelves. You can imagine it being a stage for women to come and find comfort, both physically and spiritually, in all aspects of the feminine experience. So congruous is it with the experience of the prints and drawings here, the Cuninggim gallery brings the feel of an installation to Jordan’s work—which would be equally effective on clean white gallery walls.
Upon entering this show, we become witness to an event that, 50 or even 30 years ago, simply wasn’t discussed in a public setting. Not only did menopause mean the end of reproductive life for women, it meant the end of productive life as well, as a woman’s main worth was measured by her ability to breed. This imposed status, or lack thereof, only exists quietly in our society today, as does the understanding that being a “breeder” holds with it a great amount of internal psychological warfare. Jordan’s work openly explores the many layers of this particular crescendo of womanhood—the madness, the depression, the physical tribulations. She sets out to examine the basic idea of menopause, and in the process she gets at the broader implications of what it means for a woman to lose her fertility.
Jordan’s strength lies in her printmaking skills and style. In several works, she marries subdued, earthy tones with skillful, clean design. The initial impact is quiet, but as the prints draw the viewer in, her symbolism begins to penetrate more deeply. “The Origin and Spread of the Hot Flash” and “Four Lunar Decades” establish connections between the female body and natural phenomena. By using recognizable symbols such as seeds and celestial bodies, Jordan affirms the idea that womanhood is at once emblematic of, and part of, the larger cycles of the universe. In the process, her prints invite comparisons with the early-1990s work of Kiki Smith, whose reminiscences of life as a woman have involved symbolic gestures toward birds, the body, the phases of the moon and prints of animal skins. Far from being unoriginal, Jordan’s use of familiar symbols and metaphors illustrates the idea that art about the feminine experience, while beginning with a very private and personal circumstance, can be as much about working within a community and coming into one’s own within that community.
In “The Origin and Spread of the Hot Flash,” Jordan applies the repetitive imagery of seeds, pods and a human brain to four separate images of the female form. In each print, she centers a static female figure—picture those purposefully nondescript drawings from your junior-high sex-education textbook—with seeds or pods hovering all around. The design is well thought-out, with what appear to be early 20th century scientific text studies printed above each woman. The interaction of the seeds and pods within these very sterile, detached descriptions of hot flashes makes for a very clean and tight presentation—and a clever juxtaposition of ideas. The staging of the “nature” matter against the “science” matter economically conveys the tension between a woman’s ability to rationally understand what’s happening to her and the actual experience of menopause, which may leave her feeling anything but rational.
In her artist’s statement, Jordan notes, “We now have a multibillion-dollar medical industry built around the premise that menopause is a disease requiring treatment.” Her show is a response to this wrongheaded, if utterly Western, idea. The recurring use of seeds and pods, along with the brilliant translation of the lunar phases printed on pristine white scrolls in “Four Lunar Decades,” point us toward what should be the foundation of this discussion: the cyclical force of nature upon us. For Jordan’s work isn’t solely about the denouement of womanhood. Within these two pieces, we begin to see a deeper subject unfolding: the ultimate cycle of death and rebirth that all organic material undergoes.
She illuminates this point perfectly in the charcoal triptych “Deterioration,” “Degeneration” and “Depleted,” brilliant drawings of enlarged microscopic ovum from the beginning of menopause (“Deterioration”) to the end of it (“Depleted”). Microscopic biological forms always translate well into visual art—enlarged, they make a fantastic study in nonobjective design. This triptych brings an eerie and ghostly atmosphere to Jordan’s body of work, driving the point home that we are indeed dealing with something as real as death, just on a smaller scale. The rebirth part comes when we look at all the pieces together—a collection of passionate works helping us to understand what this rite of passage can mean for a woman. Our understanding and acceptance as a culture is part of the rebirth, and this show speaks volumes about how far we have come and how much further we have to go.
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