JORDAN ZAYAS KELLY
June 18th-25th, 2025
Don’t Touch, Do Tell
Opening Reception: June 18th, 2025
Dear reader,
This is my most exhaustive and exhausting work to date; a collection of attempts at escapism, grasping for tendrils to translate sensations into the visual. This body of work comes on the heels of a season filled with Sinners, ICE raids, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style (“they done fucked up and made the met black,”-Law Roach) the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, they not like us, Coco Gauff winning the french open, and of course, the BET awards.
My manipulation of materials has become a practice of harnessing histories that resist traditional documentation, and you may ask me “why sugar?”, why steel isn’t neutral, and how these cumulative decisions amount to a critique of the institution, when perhaps what you really want is for these materials to behave, to adhere to preexisting canons, notions and sentiments.
Working with steel, sugar, cotton, and denim fosters a dialogue between industrial materials and their violent histories, interrogating how power structures become inlaid in both architectural and artistic spaces. By working with exclusively historically exploited materials, the work transforms them into aesthetic interventions that interrogate their extractive histories, functioning across multiple registers; as specific geographic locations of oppression, as forced displacement from ancestral lands, and as the commodification of Black women’s bodies that became the fulcrum of plantation economies. This haptic engagement with archive and memory becomes a rigorous methodology for accessing histories that resist traditional documentation.
Steel is stern and firm, but not unrelenting. She was drafted, selected* rather—invoking steel mills and industrial labour while simultaneously addressing the material’s clinical sterility, a metaphor for the sterilisation of black women and the sanitisation of cultural objects. These industrial processes echo the violent histories embedded in the material, transforming the fabrication process itself into poetic assertion. Where the modernist tradition treated steel as neutral, my practice insists on its historical entanglements. Roots, a series of modular structures is a nod to the spatialcartographies within the diaspora, it is of, from, and for transient/iterative* living whilst the wordplay references narrative violence. The technical composition of these works—combining cotton’s thorny history with industrial processes—creates media tension between oppression histories and resilience narratives.
Like buildings and institutions rendering themselves “important” or of cultural significance and permanence, this installation takes on the figure of stone but builds from/of/upon the exploitation of Many Men™️, of/and/from a foundation soiled in the exploitations of others, soiled in silence, violence, pain, beauty, etc…I need not enumerate the reasons, incidences, and examples that have been made of those who dare to [insert] in spite of [insert] in and at a time where…[insert Black History]. These bricks, born of brown sugar, form an edifice, and conjure a participatory dimension through their gradual deterioration. The deeply structured letters engraved into them slowly crumble and melt, leaving sticky tread marks across the floor and eventually onto the street as visitors unknowingly carry traces of the work on their shoes. This indexical method of mark-making becomes an added layer of tracing that speaks to complicity and participation in larger sociopolitical systems. The sticky residue creates a physical marker of how histories transform the passive viewer into an unwitting distributor of historical material.
This is a site where I invite, in fact insist on confronting the histories embedded in seemingly ordinary materials. The technical decisions are inseparable from conceptual frameworks. Each choice is an interrogation: the sourcing of cotton connects to histories of plantation economies, steel fabrication techniques reference industrial exploitation, while the compositional approach creates dialectical tensions between art, artefact and aesthetics.
This work recognizes the innate qualities imbued in materials and their capacity to manifest abstract historical and political concepts in tactile form, demanding not just visual but embodied engagement with histories of oppression and resistance architectures that have systematically redacted vital narratives from institutional records.
This body of work is timely, and necessary. It comes from heartbreak and betrayal, from longing for a home that has shown me and the people that look’n’sound like me that She* doesn't care for me, does not care for US. Yes, U.S./Us/US. And still I miss Her, and reach for the things that bring me comfort, for the “classics,” for the things that, despite it all, evoke a certain respect and reverence through collective memory.
Take care + Don’t Touch, Do Tell,
Jordan
Works Cited:
Family, Friends, and Friends that’ve become family
Jones, Kellie. Complete Works.
McKittrick, Katherine. Complete Works.
Mintz, Sidney W. Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History. Yale University Press, 1960.
Perry, Imani. Complete Works.
Walker, Kara. Complete Works.
Wynter, Sylvia. Complete Works.
@abigaillucien, Social Media Content.
@al_thru_glass, Social Media Content.
@the.black.gaze, Social Media Content.
@raayya. Social Media Content.
@rayakassisieh. Social Media Content.
*End Note
I return to this months later, earnestly. The inquisition: a distinction that sits between technique and visual language. The thorns being at the center—a unique, decisive and cutting method of making that is already prickly. A reductive technique chosen with intention to convey the reductive histories we are all well educated in. It's cutting, and leaves a scar, in a way that other additive thorn-making techniques feel more ornamental. It's labor intensive, as most things in metal, but like scrapple—a Southern-Mid Atlantic staple deemed "ethnic food," pork trimmings and other discarded food congealed into "mush" that's seasoned and fried to perfection, much a loaf nonetheless made to avoid waste but now a treat to savor—takes time and reworking. Much like my ancestors, I'm salvaging all the material I've got in an attempt to shed light on and amplify the beauty that comes in spite of and at the site of...
In good faith, I've consulted librarians and professionals to further investigate this distinction and discover the origins of thorns in metalwork, especially given my work's shared technique with my peer, Raya Kassisieh. There are numerous methods for creating and interpreting thorns: some have been around for centuries, while others are relatively new, having emerged alongside new metalworking technologies around 1900. This method has existed since the first welding machine appeared before 1900 and has taken many forms since then, with "the use of the angle grinder slitting disc and heating torch are ubiquitous—cutting into a tube and lifting the shaped piece is nothing new."This use of the angle grinder, a tool taught to myself and all RCA students by field experts and technicians who bring their own skills from previous projects and learned techniques from fabrication labs and experimentations with artists like Alice Channer, represents an amalgamation of passed-down traditions and collective wisdom, tweaked and refined through generations of makers. This collective wisdom is widely considered a 'shared metalworking tradition' according to the British Blacksmiths Association (becoming a member of which has been, I must admit, the greatest gift and biggest flex).
Given this shared heritage and my commitment to ethical practice, I want to be clear: I never have, nor will or intend to claim this as my own. My practice is conceptual and a byproduct of education instilled in me by syllabi, friends, family and encounters I still cannot shake. My aim has never been to imitate another artist's voice or create one and claim it as my own—that is not my practice. The aim instead is to engage with form and material through a lens shaped by my lived experience, research, and cultural memory. This process serves as a vehicle for exploring themes central to my practice—labor, Black material histories, and survival—not as borrowed gesture, but as part of a language I've built through study, experimentation, and care. The work stands in for the unsaid and unsung, and I want to take up and preserve as much space as possible and clear the way for others to join me in this pursuit. I honestly and earnestly mean this, as a sign off and request: Take care.