BIO

Jessie is a printmaker living in Minneapolis. Originally from Charlottesville, VA, she went to school for literature and creative writing in Athens, GA, lived for four years in Alaska where she worked with salmon and conducted wild food harvest surveys for the Department of Fish and Game, and moved to Minnesota in 2018 to be close to friends and learn from the thriving art/craft scene. In Minnesota she has found many lovely lakes and bike trails, learned to canoe, worked at a marionette puppet theater, trained as a gardener/landscaper, worked on an organic vegetable farm, teaches woodblock printmaking and spoon carving (formally and informally), helped kids make books and adults use letterpress presses at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, is helping build a deep winter greenhouse in Minneapolis, and is involved in transitioning a local woodshop for women and nonbinary makers into a nonprofit organization. She taught illustration and anime to American teens in Japan in the summer of 2019 and is curious about a future in teaching more formally. In Covid times, she has been part of some low key virtual reading groups with friends and family and is hoping to write more this winter.

INSPIRED BY

-funny human dynamics--(conversations with people (my housemates, friends, coworkers, overheard odd snippets from strangers, misunderstandings, synchronicities, the weird way people think about animals and pets and the natural world, disconnected senses of humor)

-Japanese printmaking (Yoshitoshi). Rembrandt's etchings. Soutine, Kokoshka, my friends' art. 

-Odd compositions encountered (strangers, architecture, trees, etc)

-Clouds-the way they move, their moods

-music--the interplay of certain instruments, friends singing together, the tone of certain loved songs, seeing a friend play an instrument well. 

-amateur art-making/chances to encourage people who have been discouraged out of making art/being part of creative one-off things (like the haunted porch my friend decorates out the wazoo for neighborhood kids every halloween) 

-All of the puppet stuff in Minneapolis (Bare Bones celebration of the dead at Halloween, the May Day Parade and the punk Battletrain that goes before it). In general community theater/low-key theater productions.

-road trips and visiting friends in faraway places, feeling at home in faraway places. 

-folk tales

-moody landscapes, tree silhouettes, dwarf evergreens, shrubs covered in burlap, the ocean in the winter

-fish (their looks and habits)

-lots of poems

-Coleman Barks talking about Rumi

-Flannery O'Connor

-cross-referencing (like the website Brainpickings)

-Julia Child cooking videos

-old movies. "Children of Paradise," "Wild Strawberries"

-stories of fanciful girls (Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler)

-how amazing writers can also be hampered by their time and then sometimes see beyond it and writers in conversation across time 

-my boyfriend's enthusiasm for role playing games and learning some of the story-telling techniques with housemates and friends (collaborative storytelling)

-the scary/powerful idea of being subjective and also universal

-my fuzzy ideas of ethics from the one philosophy class I took--the idea of treating others as ends in and of themselves, and doing activities that have value to me in and of themselves. 

-the podcast "How to Survive the End of the World"

-small public acts of insubordination

EXPLORING:

My idea is to write and illustrate (or pair with etchings/carvings) several pieces. I am thinking of short fiction but there might be a couple of nonfiction essays too.

INSPIRATION FOR PROJECT:

I've had a few ideas simmering for a while and mostly just want to write. I have found that most of my creative work ends up being in printmaking, though my first love was writing poetry (which is how I ended up in a printmaking class--a class at the University of Virginia for printmakers and poets to work together) and then writing short fiction. The past two years I have been a studio monitor at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and thinking a lot about making a book of some kind, although not a precious one that is a collectors item-style that takes so much time it isn't affordable to produce or obtain. Last winter a friend asked me to illustrate a kids book she wrote, and I struggled to make the illustrations, realizing that I lack practice in repeating characters. I think block printing could be an alternative to drawing characters that allows more flexibility, and potentially collaboration (different artists could interpret different stories, or scenes within a story). An artist at MCBA last year created a book on a waterfall in the Mississippi River, using driftwood and stones found from the river, and recruiting many artists to help make the prints. I like this idea of collaborative craft in printmaking and a social art practice tied into the project. I also teach woodblock printing to adults, many of whom feel a lack of confidence in themselves as "artists," and I think it would be exciting to invite newer printmakers to participate and feel seen and encouraged, since many of their ideas and ways of working bring new perspective. I also feel that I am a young artist without much training, even though I've been making art for many years, so I like the chance to make and learn with people.