Jess Kidd West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
I’m a multi-disciplinary artist with a current focus on painting, who studied at Central Saint Martins. I'm inspired when art provokes people to reconsider the familiar. Throughout last year I started experimenting with 2D mixed media paintings, using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) as a tool to enable my art. I want my work to be both expressive and representational. I am a TB survivor.
Returning to my home-town, Keighley, in 2018, my understanding of what I wanted to achieve through my art clicked into place. As I got to know my community again, it hit me how often and ferociously people slated it. Growing up here I assumed it was a rubbish place to live, however once I'd left, I missed certain things unique to the place. As I learnt about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for improving my own mental health, I thought about how I could apply the same principles to a place through my artistic practice. Now I feel passionate about challenging people's opinions of this northern working class town, and I wonder how the image of a town affects the lives of people living in it.
I am currently exploring different painting methods to push my technique further and explore mark making that can be both expressive and representational. A lot of art about my area focuses on the romantic Brontë moors, ignoring the realities of contemporary life. It’s important my work depicts a sense of place that people can relate to. I want to paint honest considered pieces of Keighley and then experiment with where and how I present my work, looking for non traditional spaces in my community to grab people's attention. I want people who might not usually choose to go to a gallery, see that I have gone out of my way to paint what I myself love and cherish. I'm hoping this will provoke people in my community to reconsider the familiar around them.
I will open up opportunities to have conversations around issues that relate to my work. I then intend to extend these opportunities to online spaces where people further afield can relate and contribute to them, informing my practice further.
As well as exhibiting the work I create I have also run workshops in and around my community.
