About Nick Jordan:

Nick Jordan is an artist whose practice includes video, drawing, painting, events and publishing. With overlapping themes that range from flytraps, ancient woodlands and extinct species to cinema, off-beat fables and frontier explorers, Jordan's work draws upon the relationship between the diminished natural world and our own multifaceted cultural histories. Nick Jordan also makes ongoing collaborative work with Jacob Cartwright.

Recent exhibitions include MoNO, The Museum of Native Oaks, The Manchester Museum; Beck's Fusions, ICA, London; Videonale 11, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany; Darwin's Eye, Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (INHA), Paris; 3rd Beijing Independent Film Festival, Songzhuang, China; Rub-a-dub-dub, Projektraum Exex, St.Gallen, Switzerland.

Some Texts:

West Point
a film by Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan
Text by Devin Zuber

“Animals have only their silence with which to confront us”—so claims Elizabeth Costello in J. M. Coetzee’s fictional take on animal rights. If it is hard to empathetically place ourselves in the otherness of slaughterhouse animals as Coetzee’s Costello does, how much more the challenge for animals that no longer exist, that cannot confront our eyes and ears with their collective witness. The silence of the extinct animal is thus a doubled one, an echo all the more recriminating if the species has perished at our hands.

Such is the silence we meet in West Point, an experimental film haunted by the vanished American Passenger Pigeon. The film combines voiceovers from John James Audubon’s descriptions of what was once the most common bird in North America with footage of locations in Kentucky, where Audubon watched over a billion birds fly in a single flock for three consecutive days. The panoramic beauty of the Ohio river that framed Audubon’s writing sets the flow of images in Cartwright and Jordan’s film, reminiscent of work by the photographer Robert Adams, or the experimental cinema of James Benning, where modern detritus—road kill, a washed-up tire—encounters American traditions of the sublime and picturesque.

As the images of modern rural America in West Point can never satisfy what we hear from Audubon’s Romantic prose, the tension between the spoken text and the moving image offers a space for reflecting more broadly on analogical thinking, the relations between species, how it was that we failed, so fatally, to imagine the fellow being of Passenger Pigeons.

There are moments when West Point comes close to re-imagining this, perhaps simply by luck of the documentary genre that the film plays with. When we hear Audubon complaining that he cannot describe the “extreme beauty” of a massive flock of pigeons alighting, we are met with the silhouette of a factory, capped by a beautiful sky. Wavering flocks of birds weave in and around the concrete towers, framed by the deep blue. In the background we hear intermittent strains from Coro, a 19th century musical piece composed by an acquaintance of Audubon’s. The pathos of the moment is genuine, even as the scene is visually anchored at the bottom by a cheap road sign that reads “Audubon St.” The sign indicates the emptying of an embodied experience of place into abstract space, where “Audubon” becomes nothing more than a detached name for an industrial street and the local dental hygiene center. The beauty in West Point that survives these depredations becomes elegiac, pointing to the silenced birds that caused Audubon to marvel, “struck with amazement” at a beauty that was “immense beyond conception.”

Devin Zuber is Assistant Professor at the Institute for English and American Studies, Osnabrück University

Let the user speak next
Videonale 11 catalogue, Kinstmuseum, Bonn, 2007

In Let the user speak next, Nick Jordan takes the viewer with him on his exploration of a very special place: the Dominican monastery of La Tourette near Lyon. The title refers to a book by the architect Le Corbusier, who designed the modernist building according to his ›Modulor‹ system. In Modulor 2 [La parole est aux usagers, 1955], Le Corbusier explains how to apply his doctrine of proportion, based on anthropometry and the Golden Section, with which he tried to create an architecture with both human dimensions and an objective order. In Jordan’s images, the cubic building evokes a cool, hermetic and deserted impression, with only the narrow window slits and small holes in the bare concrete walls connecting us to what’s inside. From the interior comes a magnetic white noise, which increasingly mixes with the sounds of birds gathering on a tree outside the monastery walls. The outside world is all the more colourful when seen from within the building, the bright blue sky and the glowing red blossoms of the trees forming a stark contrast with the sallow grey of the concrete whose few touches of warmth come from small windows in primary colours. Nick Jordan documents here a compelling encounter with an icon of modern architecture, which both stands out like a solitary accent from its surroundings and yet attains a harmony with nature. [Tina Rehn]

Alien Invaders: A guide to non-native species of the Britisher Isles, by Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan

From: New Scientist magazine, 26 August 2006:

This bizarre little book - a beautifully illustrated, 45-page introductory guide to some of Britain and Ireland's non-native plant and animal species - is presented by its publishers as a "cross-pollination of fact and fiction". As well as information about invaders such as the American bullfrog, Chinese mitten crab and the pharaoh ant, be prepared for some fabulous anecdotes, such as the claim that the toxic hazards of the giant hogweed only fully came to light in the summer of 1977 "when, under the influence of the film Star Wars, many children made impromptu light sabres from the stems". Or that shortly after the death of Princess Diana, who was fond of grey squirrels, five dozen of the animals were found drowned in the lake of her home, Kensington Palace, allegedly killed by royal gardeners desperate to be rid of them.

Squirrels and Hard Nuts
Nicholas Clee on Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles

From: The Guardian, September 9, 2006:

Cartwright and Jordan are artists, who describe this little hardback as a "cross-pollination of fact and fiction". The reader may find it hard to separate the strands. Can it really be true that between 30,000 and 50,000 road accidents each year in the UK involve deer? According to a website called deercollisions.co.uk, it is. On the other hand, I do not think that itten crabs, plaguing fishermen, steal a bait called "Urk". A stew of grey squirrel, we read, was known in the US South as "limb chicken", and was a favourite of the young Elvis Presley. The Princess of Wales used to take Princes William and Harry to scatter nuts for the grey squirrels in the garden of Kensington Palace; after her death, five dozen squirrels, allegedly the victims of vengeful royal gardeners, were found drowned in the palace lake.

Alien Invaders has entries on 10 species that have become ruthlessly efficient at adapting to their new home in the UK. There are silhouettes in the text - of Elvis, for example - and slyly humorous colour plates. The combination of fact, bizarre anecdote and invention gives to the species a patina of myth. Cartwright and Jordan may have human analogies in mind.

Aliens Invaders of The Britisher Isles
Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright make assumptions and assertions about Alien Species

From: Garageland, Issue 3, Nature

The alien invaders of this new Book Works title are flora and fauna that have colonised these fair isles often to the detriment of our own native species. Volume 1 includes profiles of the beautiful cerulean-billed Ruddy Duck, the stately Giant Hogweed and the frankly alarming American Bullfrog. Outwardly the book mimics a pocket nature guide with the comfy look of the Ladybird series. However naturalists beware as this book is by artist tricksters Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan and is full of stories that cross-pollinate truth and fiction drawing on “scientific fact and bizarre cultural anecdote”. Many stories are so fantastical that they may even be true, such as Biba’s Art Deco style terrarium containing breeding bullfrogs, the German street wandering Mitten Crabs that ‘made a mess in many houses’ and the five dozen Grey Squirrels found drowned in Kensington Palace lake after Princess Diana’s death.

There is however a darker side to the fun. The success of these invaders implies that they may be Darwin’s fittest, something that will no doubt alarm those of a right wing disposition as they contemplate human immigration. And the book’s crazy cultural anecdotes worryingly recall alarmist rumours about immigrant communities in host countries. The purity dichotomy is typified by the Bluebell; the Spanish Bluebell has hybridised with the British leading to a real danger that the weedy British version will become extinct. But fear not as this has led to legislation that makes it ‘Totally illegal to offer bluebells for sale or to smoke them’!

Overall the book is entertaining and thought provoking and I hope that Volume 2 will contain my favourite invader, appearing soon on a coastline near you… The Hottentot Fig.

- Cathy Lomax

Some more reviews of 'Alien Invaders' book:

Lab Times

New Statesman

Mapping The Marvellous

Alien Invaders

From: The Saatchi Gallery, editorial, September 9, 2006:

Speaking of otherworldly beings, 'Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles (Volume 1)' is a wonderful collaboration between Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan, recently published by Bookworks. Researching invasive non-native species of plant and animal life, the project documents, through drawing and text, the discovery and history of selected alien species introduced to the British Isles, and the effect on native wildlife. Presented as a cross-pollination of fact and fiction, the book is fashioned as a illustrated natural history guide, offset by the artists' interventions. Who ever thought the American Bullfrog, Giant Hogweed, Spanish Bluebell and Welsh Catfish would create such controversy - but believe me, I've seen gentle-looking conservationists get hot headed about those non-native bells taking over Abney Park Cemetery, and it was a reminder of humanity's urge to possess and compete, chillingly vivid and real as evolution itself. Bizarre as the examples may seem, these artists are really onto something. £6.50, available from Bookworks.

Fury
Videonale 10 catalogue, Kinstmuseum, Bonn, 2007

Views of a French village prelude the film and lead to an interior space with a woman sitting at an open window. This classically composed view from a window alternates with close-up shots of flies who swarm among the kitchen utensils on the table. Their fellow species-members are already stuck dead upon the fly paper. The camera shows in close-up the struggle for survival of the last twitching flies, whose oversized representation induces repugnance as well as a certain attraction. Both responses are effects of the quiet, contemplative images. The close-ups reveal even more about the seemingly inappropriate title: Fury is simply the brand of the insect trap.

Everyday life is the point of departure and also the contents of the work. The effect of the formal realization is the aestheticization of the everyday scenario, as well as a loathsome, morbid aspect. The flies’ corpses and the sleeping woman call up associations of death, which may be pursued further through the presence of iconographic set pieces, such as the basket of fruit as a still life and vanitas motif. Among the references to cinematic practice is the visual dissection of the moving picture into a sequence of individual images: "The stillness of cinema at 24 frames per second," comments the artist in reference to Godard’s remark: "Cinema is truth 24 times a second." (Stefanie Zobel)