Interviews with Radical Growers + Makers - JAI BESS
This new part of my blog is an excuse for me to reach out to people I admire and ask the personal burning questions I have, which wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate under any other setting.
Resilient block printing, land stewardship and micro farming
I first came across Jai’s work years ago, I couldn’t believe how wonderful it was. We’d recently built Cato Press (my printmaking studio) and had started running our community events and here was an artist living and breathing all the stuff I was talking about!
Jais work isn’t just beautiful, its strong and her voice shines through it. Aswell as making gorgeous prints she manages to maintain a brilliant and bustling growing project with her family. Her instagram is a treat, full of flowers, sheep and rabbits, go take a look Im sure your going to fall in love with her work and her message just as I did!
Can you tell me a little bit about yourself as an artist and how you started out?
I have started to describe myself as a seasonal printmaker. In the growing months the carving tools are necessarily put down and replaced with trowels and the broad forks.
But each season feeds into the other - the growing season fills my sketchbooks with ideas that I’m hungry to pull together and simply don’t have the time to touch - and I’m hoping the winter months of carving about the land will feed my desire to begin the whole process again come spring.
I have no formal art background but a longstanding and deep love for printmaking. It began for me with a printmaking gift set - crummy inks and cheap tools. I sat on my bed and carved out a little map, including text which I failed to reverse, and was hooked.
It wasn’t until I was pregnant with my son, I had just graduated and was watching my friends fall into lives that involved grown up jobs and paychecks, that I recognised I wanted it to be something more serious. I knew I needed to find a way to afford to be home with my soon to be born baby, so I carved and carved and carved. Of course it wasn’t immediately the magic answer, and I worked as a childminder by day and drew and carved every evening, until eventually the balance shifted and I could justify printmaking as my work.
What drew you to print in particular as a medium?
Printmaking itself is a deeply pleasing and meditative act, getting into the flow of carving is a feeling like nothing else. The hours just melt away. But the appeal is multilayered.
It is that printmaking enables unique and individual pieces of art to be sold at a price that isn’t financially exclusive, whilst still supporting the artist, that has always appealed. It feels like a democratic and accessible form of art, rather than one that exclusively exists for the walls of galleries and affluent buyers.
It is also an accessible art form to learn - you can make just as much magic with cheap mediums and splotchy inks as you can with all the expensive tools. Whilst I have finally taken the leap into buying a print press, I have spent years relying on my trusty wooden spoon!
What inspires your designs and how has your politics influenced your work?
If I had to narrow it down to one thing, it is the connections between people and the land that inspires me most. The intersection between the human and non-human world is so charged - the ways in which we can influence for the better and significantly the worse.
Growing food in a relatively impoverished area was really formative, both in terms of understanding how much I had taken for granted in the way I live and access food, but the conversations with people and their children who had never grown their own food and were unable to recognise the plants that were growing.
We live in a disempowering society, the news makes us feel that a future of climate crisis, and war, and widening gaps between the poor and the wealthy are inevitable. We consume tales of superheroes and in many respects wait to be rescued.
When you grow a garden, learn about pollinators, contribute your time to communal projects, you’re taking back your power. I want everyone to feel the excitement of living and determining in a small way what the future should look like, and celebrate each of those small victories.
I hope my work holds and reflects that joy and hope.
Can you give me a little insight into your process? How do you go about designing your prints?
I fill sketchbooks constantly. They aren’t sexy, pinterest worthy sketchbooks, but scrawls and notes and a lot of badly drawn chickens. But they’re an essential part of the process for me. I find that after a while, themes emerge. The year we starting keeping bees, my garden was filled with pollinating flowers and I had spent so much time researching hives and reading bee books, that my sketchbook reflected that back to me and a print about bees and plants became inevitable.
I then flick through and pick the elements out that I want to include and draw and draw until they make some kind of sense.
Can you describe the space/studio where you create your work?
I work in crumbling shed in our garden. It isn’t glamorous in the slightest and half of it has had to become a potting shed this year, so I battle to keep the inks and the composts separate. It has a dinky solar panel, a titchy log burner, an enormous desk and is absolutely everything I have ever hoped for.
The previous owner built a porch which is slowly rotting away but I can stand there with my coffee and watch the goldfinches eat the dandelion heads, or pick at the bindweed in the moments I crave a pause.
What are your favourite artists, musicians/ sources of inspiration?
I generally try to stay away from the work of other artists when looking for inspiration, particularly with the world of Instagram so readily available it is easy for it to stray into my work, or for the talents of others to tip from inspiring to overwhelming
That said, I was gifted a book of Victoria Crowe’s work recently - A Shepherds Life, which was breathtaking. It is a series of portraits of Jenny Armstrong, a shepherd in rural Scotland, and her home and life. I find the lives of people living on the land, or in less traditional ways really exciting. There is a chap living in a converted horse box currently parked by a river close to our home and I would give nearly anything for a tour round his house - how people choose to live resilient lives, not funnelled down paths of convenience is thrilling.
For the same reasons, I regularly visit our local Rural Life museum to draw or look for ideas. Craft and craft people are always inspiring, it is something about that deep connection and understanding of a material and a tool.
Musically, I am currently listening to Johnny Flynn and always Cosmo Sheldrake on repeat - particularly the album using bird songs, isn’t it neat how differently people are inspired to interact with the world we live in?
What is the main message you’re trying to get out there into the world?
The importance and deep joy of a connected, resilient life. That taking ownership of your existence and how you intereact with the planet is one of the most valuable, and exciting things we can do.
I feel obsessive in my need to share this message - in my printmaking, in the way we choose to live and at the moment I am up all hours in an effort to write a book about the art of resilience.
You can see more of Jai’s beautiful prints and find out more about her by clicking the link below…
