Jordan Metcalf - Ennui having Fun Yet?

October 5 - 27, 2024 

Jordan Metcalf is a South African artist and designer whose work sits at the intersection of contemporary graphic aesthetics and traditional, labour intensive craft.

Ennui having Fun Yet?

This is an exploration of dualities—the difficulty of finding and sustaining happiness in a world increasingly centred around our comfort and convenience. Of contemporary, graphic forms drawn out of a highly natural medium, and historical craft; and of the labour intensive, messy, and physically demanding process it takes to create soft curves and clean shapes. 

What started as a personal artistic practice, a way of rediscovering joy through making, these pieces quickly started to take on the theme of the search itself as well as the challenges of actualising the pursuit. Each hand-carved sculpture is an illustration of this search for happiness as well as a result of it—a delicate balance of hope and longing, fortitude and fragility, joy and melancholy.