Hello, my name is Jessie.
I am a Cultural Creative living and working in lutruwita, Tasmania, home of the palawa people.
My perspective has been cultivated by an uncommon upbringing.
Born in North West Tassie, I have spent most of my life elsewhere, attended high school in North India where I received a global education alongside students from over 40 countries. Returning to Australia to study Anthropology at Melbourne University, I have since lived in a broad-acre housing commission suburb in Tasmania and a remote Indigenous community in North East Arnhem Land. Five years ago coming full circle, back to the family farm, where I continue to cultivate my arts practice and be surprised by the richness of reconnecting with my own place and cultural history.
Art.
As an artist I explore place and presence in the neglected fringes of society; places where the boundary between the built and the natural world are beginning to blur, with vernacular architecture and domestic debris often providing the visual language through which this exploration is articulated.
Some personal highlights of my career include being mentored by Raymond Arnold for the Regional Arts Australia National Showcase, Right Here Now, at the Museum of Australian Democracy, Old Parliament House in 2016 and co-creating the community arts project Here She Is, for Ten Days on the Island 2019 with fellow artist Anne Morrison.
Culture.
Both my formal training and life experience has equipped me to see the sensitivities within different ways of meaning-making and respectfully engage diversity.
As a socially-engaged artist, deep listening is essential to my practice. I seek to be both an expert and a learner and invite others to do the same.
These understandings have been steeped in a lifetime of learning from diverse cultural groups and socio-economic backgrounds. My international and community development experience has included numerous immersive, cross cultural experiences in India, Nepal, the Philippines, Thailand, North East Arnhem Land and marginalised Tasmanian communities. This lived experience has been supplemented by my formal studies in Anthropology and International Development as an undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne, and more recently, first class Honours in Contemporary Art from the University of Tasmania.
Within my local community I continue to facilitate creativity and connection through designing, hosting and supporting community-based art projects, workshops and events .
Place.
Life has asked me to stand in liminal spaces. Whether living in a tent, broad acre housing commission suburb or rural India, it is this orientation to the margins that encapsulates my stance both as an anthropologist and artist. It has given me an peripheral perspective that I find insightful, a quietness that can allow things to be noticed, and space for things to gently grow that may be lost or swept up in the busy-ness and clamour of the centre.
Home now is an aged farm-house, perched on a green hill, surrounded by the chocolate dirt of this rich agricultural region of North West Tasmania. From here we look North, out over the sprinkle of townships that hug the coast line to Bass Strait and the world, always beckoning.
The house itself was build by my Grandfather, the trees planted by my Nana, and then my father, and now me, as I raise my own family in the same house where I was born.
I value this slow, simple living - walking barefoot on the beach every morning after school drop off, growing our own food and sourcing everything else from the local community, cutting our own wood on the farm. We are connected to the land that sustains us, to the people that came before us, to this place.
Clients
Ten Days on the Island + Big hArt - Project O + University of Tasmania + Central Coast Council + Devonport Regional Gallery + The Art Vault + Cradle Mountain Wilderness Gallery + Arts Tasmania
Offerings
Creative Design + Production + Facilitation + Community Engagement + Workshops + Writing + Public Speaking
Exhibitions
2020 Scope: Tools for Seeing, Poimena Gallery, Launceston
2019 On Belonging(s) Devonport Regional Gallery, Devonport
2019 Here She Is, 10 Days on the Island festival project, Stewart St Gallery, Devonport
2018 UTAS School of Creative Arts Grad Show, The Academy Gallery, Inveresk
2018 Unsettled, Power House Gallery, Inveresk
2017 House Show, Constance ARI Battery Point, Hobart
2016 Tasmanian Art Award (Judges Commendation) Eskleigh
2016 TRANSform The Little Gallery, Devonport Regional Gallery, Devonport
2015 – 16 Right Here Now: Regional Arts Australia Showcase, Museum of Australian Democracy, Canberra