SSNAP Education Committee Artist Visit: Jesi Jordan at Salt Spring Elementary

Visiting artist Jesi Jordan @jesi__jordan led an animation workshop with Christina Novak’s Grade 4/5 class at Salt Spring Elementary as part of SSNAP’s Education Committee programming.

This initiative brings practicing artists into local classrooms, offering students the chance to connect directly with contemporary art and artists. Each visit includes an artist talk and a collaborative creative project, encouraging students to explore contemporary art practices and develop their own visual language.

The class created their own animations, with students choosing between two formats: a stop-motion cut-out piece inspired by their class name, The Owls, or a 10-frame self-portrait drawing sequence. Jesi demonstrated how to animate a walking figure and guided each student through their chosen project. By the end of the afternoon, the students’ work had been photographed and was later compiled by Jesi into a final collaborative animation complete with music.

The result is imaginative, expressive, and deeply personal. It reflects the students’ creativity shaped by an artist’s unique approach and represents a successful step forward in the Education Committee’s work to deepen connections between artists and
our community.

Jesi Jordan is a self-taught traditional animator, painter, and experimental video artist with over 20 years of experience in classical animation. She uses metamorphosis as a form of surreal and abstract storytelling and employs automatism, a spontaneous, unplanned creative process, as a core method in her animation practice, allowing her work to evolve organically in real time. The body serves as a central motif and vessel for personal expression, transforming fluidly to explore themes of identity and the subconscious mind.
 
You can view more of Jesi’s work at:
www.jesi.ca

Captions:

  • Storyboard design by Jesi Jordan
  • Jordan Jordan
  • Photographing classroom artwork during animation process
  • Storyboard artwork by Gr. 4/5 student
  • Storyboard artwork by Gr. 4/5 student
  • Jesi working on animation during her residency at the Toronto Animated Image Society
  • Feature image – A portion of Jesi’s solo exhibition at the museum Galeria Libertad in Querétaro, where she exhibited over 15,000 of her hand painted animation frames

Video Links

The Owls

Butterfly Kisses