Ivan Forde ’12
“One of the things for me that sets Purchase apart is how close-knit the students are.”
Ivan Forde ’12 (Literature) is a Guyanese-born, Harlem-raised contemporary artist based in New York City, working across photography, printmaking, collage, sound performance, and installation.
Making Space for Contemplation: Eternal Seas Merges Art and Environmentalism
In 2023, Forde collaborated with the textile company BIONIC® on Eternal Seas, a series of cyanotypes that depict new poetic visions of fictional and real bodies of water worldwide. Forde used BIONIC’s high-performance textiles made from plastic waste recovered from coastal communities and marine ecosystems for the work originally presented at the New York Cotton Exchange.
Eternal Seas is now on view as part of the British Textile Biennial (BTB)—a free festival of contemporary art that brings together artists and designers from around the world to explore the legacy and global impact of the textile industry in East Lancashire.
Eternal Seas is indicative of Forde’s work as he often “intertwines the personal and the global to offer a transformative view of prevailing narratives that unite us across cultures, geographies, and time.”
He sees himself as a “conduit” or “collaborator,” tapping into classical literature, identity, family, politics, nature, and history to make space for conversation and contemplation.
The Library Guy
While Forde was already practicing photography when he came to Purchase, he chose to pursue Literature over a fine art degree to become a better reader.
“Obviously, I could read,” he says, “but I felt like there was something more that was necessary for me to access in terms of communication and being able to process information and to make connections.”
The merging of literature and fine art happened over time through classes and intensive reading—poetry became visual and photography became poetic.
Known as “The Library Guy” for all the time he spent in the Purchase library, Forde would often stretch out on a couch to read. Diving deep into Milton, “some of the most impactful verses in the English language,” he recalls nodding off while reading Paradise Lost. The words became visual as he napped.
“I would fall into a dream where that world would kind of open up. That’s where the visual aspects of those verses would be animated for me.”
The resulting artwork inspired by those dreams became his senior project: Transformation, a series of self-portraits representing the reader of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Years later, a key work from the series, “Fall of Man,” was included in the 2023–2024 exhibition Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures at the Smithsonian National African American Museum of History & Culture in Washington, DC.
Looking back at the work ten-plus years later sheds new light on it for Forde.
“Looking at it now, I see it as the keystone to my artistic practice.”
Read more about Forde in a recent story written to accompany “Fall of Man” appearing on the cover of Proof, the magazine of Purchase.
Follow Forde on Instagram: @workdaily
https://www.instagram.com/p/DP4OvOrEejF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
https://britishtextilebiennial.co.uk/events/ivan-forde-bionic-yarn/
Last Friday, artist Ivan Forde (@workdaily) was in conversation with curator Dr. Christine Checinska (@checinskachristine), celebrating his series ‘Eternal Seas’ (2023), made in collaboration with BIONIC (@bionicyarn). The artworks offer profound commentary on the complex relationships between historical manufacturing sites, synthetic textile innovation, and global trade. Through this installation, Forde uses BIONIC high-performance textiles made from recovered marine and coastal plastic.