Jordan Waraksa:
All I know is how I feel. Any confidence I have in my sweetly theoretical ways is produced by memories of how things emotionally affect me. I don’t consider myself just a sculptor. In fact most days I see myself as a boy, a daydreamer, a teacher, a man, a friend, a musician, a romantic, a designer, a process, and artist. In any shoes I fill, I feel that my artwork has sensibility, craftsmanship, and nostalgia. Responding to the world by spitting back what is illusion and imagination to me.
My work deals with the correspondence between shape and sound. Visual form and shape in relationship to its response of vibration. Any object able to harness its resonance and vibrations is a form of an instrument. Today most “instruments” are used for the creation of traditional kinds of music with wide ranges of literature. A more non-traditional and less culturally identifiable form of instrument making is on the area of sculpture. Sound sculpture is the medium in which I am pursuing. Sound sculpture is less about creating an instrument, and more about creating a complementary sound to a sculptural object. I have carved large wooden horns to be able to produce sound and also amplify it. The horns are of western red cedar, and are hollowed out to be able to produce different pitches through the mouthpiece. Their shape and form are similar to that of vintage gramophones from the 1930’s. I started drawing these forms on paper in a very sketchy way with repeated lines to build the form two-dimensionally. Then to represent the aesthetic of my drawings, I chose a wood that had very fine grain, almost giving a stripped affect similar to the drawing.
Wood is much like a fine wine, it was once a living organism. It is cut down as a tree, and milled into systemic size at a lumberyard. As it lies there the moisture begins to evaporate from fibers in the grain. The cells slowly begin to die, but if the moisture leaves to quickly the wood will warp, twist, and buckle. Like the fine wine, we control the death of the wood. Certain steps are taken to ensure the slow and careful dying process. These properties of the wood leave me constantly surprised and anxious to work with wood. Like breaking open fresh fruit, what is on the inside is beautiful and unpredictable. These processes, properties, and history associated with wood gives me such grand respect for this organic material. This respect drives my process to work with it, as it now becomes my material of choice.
I tend to take my time, enjoying my process. It is a slow and meticulous process, although very intuitive. I am a very indecisive person, and it shows in the length of time it takes me to finish something. In working sculpturally the last couple of years, I have gotten used to not being able to go back if you made the wrong decision. I deal with the mistakes in real space. If I cut something to small or crack a material, I can’t always “like, just glue it back on”. On the other hand with wood I can be very responsive if a mistake is made. Most often there is nothing I can do to reverse it so I consider what happened a creative accident, and allow it to affect the work. I work with the material, not against it. Every piece of wood I work with is as individual in grain, color, and imperfections as a human fingerprint.

Jordan's work will be featured at SOFA-Chicago.

Sound Sculpture I	Sound Sculpture II