Joan Giordano

Time & The River	Dancer
Crosscurrents	Red Swamp

	Interior of Giordano Studio with cast Farmers Hands
Botanical Series #2	Botanical Series #1	Botanical Series #3

All rights reserved by Joan Giordano

The following information was provided by the artist unless otherwise noted.

I work in a studio, surrounded by mountains that cascade down to a lake, transforming textures and materials derived from the earth--paper from plants, copper from ore--into works that question beliefs and are inspired by personal experiences. I have experimented with materials for over 30 years, from painting and encaustics, to lithography at The Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Eventually my work evolved dimensionally through handmade paper. I make my own paper using Kozo and other plant fiber to defy the concept that paper is flat or fragile; for me it is transformative. Then again, burned out electrical cables liberated from local junk yards are given new life in my work: their new existence--bundled, knotted or stitched--is a visual metaphor for life. What is presented is not always what it seems. My work challenges universal attitudes about power and strength, fragility and erosion and the permanence of materiality. By recycling and reexamining preconceptions, these materials live again in altered form from seed to plant, from plant to pulp, to handmade paper cast hands or fused paper skins on copper.

Childhood images of my mother, a seamstress in the garment district of New York, fitting and refitting, bending and enveloping, protecting and sheathing, slavishly piecing and threading life's fragments, inspire this work; metal is fashioned like a garment. I remember her strong, agile hands sewing richly textured fabrics at home. The electrical cable I use refers to those associations, stitching together opposites in a family, in a marriage binding all by a thread.

"Joan Giordano's work has a carefully calibrated disparity of mediums and forms--papery, steely and obdurate--that is seldom seen together. A sculptor and painter who came to her current work from papermaking, Giordano pairs sheets of metal with handmade paper, combining them in ways that stretch their affinities in strength, flexibility, and texture."
Nancy Princenthal, critic, Art in America, 1994

"Her hybrids unite painting and sculpture. At once concrete and elusive, these anthropomorphic abstractions fold space and snap our preconceptions about the limits of art."
Gerard Haggerty, critic, Art in America, 1997 Vol. 99S

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