Jordan, S.B and Thackray, A.J. 2021. Structure and Fluidity: An Exercise in Human Intervention in the Sea. Ed. Sarah Tobias. Rejoinder, 6.
The following is an excerpt from an ongoing experimental artistic practice in service of new thinking around water, climate crisis and safer futures, where environmental, social and design justice are inextricably bound. Focusing on process and aggregation, the artists, Stephanie Jordan and Amanda Thackray, write short essays (maximum 100 words) inspired by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant’s The Hundreds. As one writes, the other creates art, then roles are reversed and images collaged. At times, the work is explicitly in dialog, at other times not. The result is an exploration in attention: to care and protection, to breakdowns in preconceived narratives, to how technology captures and mimics nature and the resilient ways in which nature transplants and adapts, to a broadening of ecological thinking in ocean engineering, and to the boundless questions that open from the sea.
Stephanie Beth Jordan 