Jessica Steele creates hand-cut paper collages using vintage print ephemera, primarily mid-century books and magazines. She is drawn to these materials for their distinctive colour palettes, shared visual language, and the social ideals they carry. Working with these remnants of another era allows her to engage with both the physical material and the ideas and histories embedded within the pages.

Her artistic process is slow and intuitive, rooted in curiosity and exploration. She sources and catalogues paper materials before searching through them for images, colours, gestures, or concepts that catch her attention. From there, she builds new relationships between these found fragments, carefully cutting, layering, and arranging them until a composition emerges. This approach often guides the direction of her work, with ideas revealing themselves through discovery and rearrangement.

Many of Jessica’s works explore themes of inner worlds, human interaction, and our relationship to the environments we inhabit. She is interested in how meaning shifts through surreal changes in scale and context, and how those shifts transform familiar or mundane imagery into something strange, humorous, or evocative. Through this process, she invites viewers to look more closely at the world around them, their perceptions of it, and perhaps even themselves.