My work explores magical realism, seeking the extraordinary amongst the everyday, the act of reaching out for something elusive, even if at that very moment it has already changed or vanished. 

Memory and landscape thread throughout my work, investigating the liminal space between land and sea, wild places, the past and present, night and day.

The act of revisiting a place, exploring its undefined boundaries creates narrative about what we see, what we remember, what has changed, and what is no longer there.

As a printmaker the core of my work is an engagement with process where mood and narrative evolve through multiple phases and mediums. This multi layered practice adds a play on luminosity, darkness, and light to create atmospheric etchings that shimmer and evoke a portal between the past and present.

Projects

The most interesting things are always in the shadows, in the invisible

The starting point for this project began with a remote and wild place, a path leading down to the shore and its gothic past. A salt water pull develops a dialogue of cyclical investigation, and is ongoing. Nature, weather and landscapes change or vanish, boundaries blend and blur, and it is what we don’t see at the edges, in the spaces between night and day, that is pivotal to my work.

The combination of intaglio print and pinhole photography, landscape and the suggestive nature of childhood memories are all examined in work that echoes with a sense of nostalgia, transformation, and tangibility.

Evocative of the past, my choice to use pinhole photography as a starting point is deliberate. The living quality of images act as a lens to glimpse things barely visible to the eye, pools of deep space and light, suggestive of layers of mist and what is just out of reach.

Through this process, the unexpected is often illuminated and the ordinary becomes transformed: fleeting moments are captured, details lost and added, and mistakes are embraced. This builds an alternative narrative of a landscape that is suggestive, more profound, and more supernatural.

There was a Time

The pursuit of knowledge about qualities of paper remain a preoccupation of printmakers. When added to a love for monochrome and the alchemy of an etching studio, a fascination for old forms of photography was inevitable. Silvered, denaturing, desaturating and on a small scale, these dormant finds” have a talisman-like hold over me and invite a custodial connection.

Much is visible within photographic imagery, but it is the details that remain hidden that are compelling, particularly the choice about what to preserve. This is a conversational process between images, places, and people, which requires a response and a desire to rethread and represent traces of memory. Refocussing a lens offers the opportunity for new dialogue.

The resulting etchings, much like the landscape, hold memories that link us with the past, anchoring us to the history of a place.

I Remember Nightfall

Inspired by Marosa Di Giorgio’s “I Remember Nightfall”, a new set of etchings will be an exploration of poetry, memory and my relationship with a familiar landscape, particularly when light fades and boundaries become less distinct and surreal. This is a new project for 2026 and the work will explore a space between childhoodrecollection and dreams.

Jess studied at Goldsmiths College of Art, London and has been a member of Spike Print Studio in Bristol since 2006.