bio

Jordan Phillips is an artist and educator based out of Houston, Texas. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, with a BFA in illustration. She loves working with food imagery and pop culture, and incorporating humor and playfulness in her work. She regularly shows work in galleries around Houston, and has created three art cars for the Houston Art Car Parade.

Follow me online to keep up to date with new work, works in progress, some behind-the-scenes stuff, and occasional cooking and dog content. Need to get in touch with me directly? Email me at jordan[at]jordanphillips.art

artist’s statement

Food is both truly universal and highly personal. How and what you eat is not only a part of your day to day life, but a tangle of your own beliefs and perceptions, the culture around you, and a long history of innovation and adaptation. Cooking and eating together can spark bonding, evoke family history, and provide the setting for rituals old and new. 

My current painting project, a series of Jell-O containing inedible items, sprouted from my fascination with the questionable Jell-O salads of yesteryear, as well as my attraction to the bright, translucent colors afforded by Red Dye #40 and friends. Capturing these colors and textures is my primary goal, though there are always conceptual underpinnings behind each piece. For example, Sweetness and Light contains pink Barbie pumps, evoking many of the feminine ideals of the era of Barbie’s debut and Jell-O salad’s popularity: be effortless, be sweet, be a little childlike.

I often utilize photography as part of my process. This started out of necessity: some of the items in the still lifes have limited lifespans outside of a fridge, and many of them would attract unwanted insect attention. But incorporating some of the artifacts of the photos, like a shallow depth of field, grew to become an important part of the look of my work. I am also able to create interesting light and shadows, often with colored light, adjust on the fly, and use my photographs to create compositional studies.