Art

Jessica likes what Paul Klee once said about art – that one eye sees, the other feels. Jessica works in a variety of mediums on many kinds of surfaces - from watercolour and thread on paper to acrylic on acetate to plastic bags sewn into canvas. Jessica’s also a poet and designer. One of the things people often ask Jessica is “what’s the difference between all the things you do?” Jessica doesn’t distinguish much between her mediums. She just chooses the best medium for exploring whichever question, concern or exaltation is most pressing to her in the moment - from delight in the body to sorrow and anger at how poorly we care for our world and each other. Sometimes she uses words, sometimes pencil, sometimes paint.

In one of her poems, she writes: “Some people sit behind a curtain to talk to the Lord and I sit behind paper, before paper, after paper… You know what paper is — it’s proof, proof that one person wants to be heard, proof that some things should last forever, that love should be recorded, that beauty is urgent. Paper is the only way that I can talk to God and honeybees…all the wings I want to believe in but can’t. I sit behind paper to talk to the Lord, to confess to love, to detonate” (from “Self-portrait without a bicycle, Biblioasis, 2012). It is through making that Jessica feels she can ask what it means to be human, even to be a good one.