Chris Jordan
Born in San Francisco, California, USA, in 1963 / Lives and works in Seattle, USA
Chris Jordan
Born in San Francisco, California, USA, in 1963 / Lives and works in Seattle, USA
Chris Jordan’s arresting film, photographs, and collaborative drawings measure the scale of our impact upon the Earth. Midway: Message from the Gyre exposes the tragic effects of plastic pollution. Photographed on Midway Atoll, remote islands more than 2000 miles from human habitation, the images of plastic waste discovered inside dead baby albatrosses illustrate the journey our uncontrolled use and disposal of plastic takes, from shop to rivers, ocean to wildlife. Silent Spring takes its title from Rachel Carson’s 1962 groundbreaking book of the same name. Carson wrote of fields and woods bereft of a dawn chorus owing to the proliferation of pesticides; Jordan and Rebecca Clark remind us of their continuing effects today. Based on Clark’s drawings, Jordan creates an image of 183,000 birds, the estimated number killed daily in the USA from exposure to pesticides. In Roundup, Jordan incorporates Helena S. Eitel’s pencil drawings of bees into a mandala depicting 213,000 of the insects to reflect the number of pounds of toxic pesticides that we apply to plants and soil around the world every twenty minutes.