Jordan Stokes - Visual Artist

Long Shadows

Homes of Nostalgia

One Hundred Trees

Projected City

Mini portraits stuck to wall in Spitalfields

Gerona- Campo de Marte, 1920. Provided by Photoconsortium. PD for Public Domain Mark 

A blue eyed woman looking through a hole in the glass

The photographs in Long Shadows emerge from a world drained of detail and certainty. Rendered in black and white, their blurred edges and soft grain turn high‑rise buildings into looming silhouettes, with structures that feel less like feats of engineering and more like apparitions. The images hover between presence and disappearance, as though the city itself is slipping out of focus. In this haze, familiar forms become uncanny: towers lean into the frame like watchful sentinels, facades dissolve into fog, and the built environment takes on an almost mythic weight.Presented as gelatin silver and digital inkjet prints, alongside carved wood sculptural works, the series reconsiders the skyscraper—long celebrated as the apex of modern ambition, a monument to wealth, progress, and technological mastery. Here, those same structures are recast as uneasy icons of the twenty‑first century. Their height no longer reads as triumph but as estrangement. Their shadows stretch across landscapes marked by environmental exhaustion and widening economic divides.Long Shadows positions these buildings as evidence of a civilisation increasingly detached from the natural systems that sustain it. Their sheer verticality becomes a metaphor for relentless extraction, for the upward surge of capital that leaves ecological and social costs in its wake. The blur in the images is not merely aesthetic; it suggests instability, a world out of alignment, a future that refuses to resolve into clarity.The accompanying wood sculptures echo this tension. Carved from organic material yet shaped into geometric forms, they sit at the threshold between the natural and the manufactured. They act as quiet counterpoints to the photographs and are reminders of what is taken, transformed, and often forgotten in the pursuit of growth.Together, the works invite viewers to reconsider the skyscraper not as a symbol of human achievement but as a monument to imbalance. In their atmospheric darkness, these buildings reveal the long shadows cast by our aspirations: shadows shaped by disconnection, by the limits of progress and by the fragile, contested ground on which our cities stand.Exhibited at The Southern Highlands Artisans Collective in 2023.

The sun shines brightly over Paris, casting a golden glow across wide boulevards and elegant streets lined with classic Haussmann architecture. Shadows and highlights create depth and atmosphere, turning ordinary moments into visual art. People stroll through the city, enjoying cafés, shopping districts, and scenic avenues while photographers capture authentic street life. The image reflects the soul of Paris—romantic, artistic, sophisticated, and full of stories waiting to be discovered. Every detail contributes to a rich urban landscape that celebrates travel, culture, architecture, and the

Quick ideation sketch of an unknown product.

A person scanning a QR code from a resume to view an art portfolio.

Homes of Nostalgia is a photographic series that examines how nostalgia is embedded in domestic Australian architecture. Centred on Sydney’s Inner West suburbs shaped by post‑war migration, the works explore how memory becomes material and how houses operate as expressions of cultural identity.In these neighbourhoods, local housing styles reveal a strong neoclassical influence. Migrants arriving in the mid‑twentieth century brought with them memories of home and a deep respect for the architectural languages of ancient Greece and Rome. As families gained stability and social status, they began to express this heritage through their dwellings. The home became a place to assert pride, aspiration and continuity with an ancestral past.Balustrades, columns, architraves, porticoes, capitals and ornate balconies, once associated with civic grandeur, were adapted to the suburban scale. These features were not merely decorative; they were statements of identity. With greater access to resources and skilled trades, migrants embellished their houses with confidence, transforming modest structures into personal monuments. The classical vocabulary was reinterpreted and sometimes exaggerated, creating a distinctive suburban aesthetic that blended Australian domestic life with Mediterranean influence.In this way, these houses are symbolic statements of their owners and are tightly linked to their identity. As symbols of nostalgia, they present the past in a new world context, where historic architectural symbolism is part of a new cultural identity.Exhibited at Gaffa Gallery Sydney in 2017.

One Hundred Trees examines the presence of non‑native conifer trees in the Wingecarribee and Goulburn regions of New South Wales, considering them as quiet but persistent symbols of nostalgia and European vernacular embedded within the Australian landscape. Over several years, one hundred individual conifers were photographed and assembled into a typological study, each tree standing as a distinct marker of cultural memory and inherited aesthetic preference.These trees are closely tied to the agricultural and social development of the region during its formation as a colonial outpost. Early settlers planted conifers as familiar anchors in an unfamiliar environment, drawing on European traditions of order, permanence and pastoral beauty. Their geometric silhouettes, evergreen foliage and association with estate gardens and rural homesteads made them ideal symbols of stability and aspiration in a landscape that was, to colonial eyes, both foreign and overwhelming.Although their origins lie in the colonial past, conifers continue to shape the visual identity of the region. Their ongoing popularity reflects a lingering attachment to European ideals of landscape design, a preference passed down through generations and absorbed into local cultural norms. They function as living artefacts of historical identity, embodying the values, aesthetics and desires of those who planted them.The series positions vegetation as an active participant in cultural history rather than a neutral backdrop. Each tree becomes a point of connection between past and present, revealing how ideas of landscape are shaped by memory, migration and inherited notions of beauty. In doing so, One Hundred Trees contributes to broader environmental and cultural conversations about how landscapes are understood, constructed and continually reinterpreted.Exhibited at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery in 2019.

Projected City is an experimental exploration of Canberra’s brutalist architecture and the ambitious ideas that shaped the national capital. Emerging from a belief in modernism, order, and progress, these buildings embody the optimism of a planned city designed to express civic identity through bold, monumental forms. Yet this film also interrogates the tensions at the heart of this vision. Many of the ideological, political, and social ambitions that drove Canberra’s design were diluted over time, leading to compromise, neglect, and, in some cases, failure. It examines how buildings once conceived as symbols of a progressive future now sit uneasily within a changing city, their material deterioration mirroring the erosion of the ideas that produced them.Created with<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.localjinni.com.au/"> Localjinni'</a>s Fiona Hooton and Catrina Vignando, the film is a colourful concoction of projection, animation and the built environment. The film features photographs taken by participants of a workshop I tutored at PhotoAccess in 2023, and additional images by Catrina Vignando and Maryanne Humphreys.Finalist in the experimental category at the Canberra Short Film Festival in 2024.

People girl and guy are watching photos on laptop screen in photography studio, photographer is showing pictures to mixed race model. Technology and business concept.