Taking inspiration from her surrounding landscape in Western Australia, Jess McKiernan’s multi-layered, reduction screenprints are brimming with beautiful flora and enchanting colours. The southwest of the region, where Jess resides, is a biodiversity hotspot, with some of the rarest flowers in the world. Her prints offer a meditation on the beauty of her environment, celebrating the colours, shapes, and patterns that are often un-noticed in the bustle of everyday life.
Each of Jess’ prints are a unique, handcrafted object, with their own quirks and imperfections that speak to the tactile, human quality of printmaking. She hand-paints each layer of colour into the screen using screen-filler in a distinctive reduction method. The following colour layers are printed directly on top of the last through careful registration. This process of building up layers to create the final image often results in an incredible10-15 layers in each print.
Jess studied a Bachelor of Fine Art at Curtin University, in Perth Western Australia, before moving to the UK where she worked in a printmaking studio in Cornwall for several years. Here, she began teaching workshops in a range of printmaking techniques, as well as screenprinting products for design companies and artists in the region. This led her to study a Post Graduate Certificate in Art & Design Education at The University of Plymouth, resulting in her teaching in public secondary schools and sixth form in the UK. She moved back to Western Australia after the first lockdown of 2020, completing a certificate in training and assessing. Today, she lectures in printmaking and art history at the South Regional TAFE in Margaret River.
Currently, Jess creates her screenprints from her home studio in between days lecturing. She now lives on the outskirts of the Carbunup River nature reserve, a small pocket of bushland that is home to some of the rearrest spider orchids in the world (only 10 each year!). This rugged local landscape, abundant with red granite rock and the turquoise blue waters of the Indian ocean is infused into her designs. Jess describes; “I aim to simplify all the colours we can see out in nature into the most essential, and recreate this in a simplified version to capture the essence of the moment.” She continues; “By simplifying the intricacies of the landscape into layers of bold colour, I invite the viewer to experience the landscape anew – not as a faithful representation, but as a distillation of its most fundamental qualities.”
Having spent most of her career teaching and facilitating printmaking for others, it is only since having more free time during lockdown that Jess has dedicated space for her printing practice. Thus, she is looking forward to expanding her career as a professional artist, and continuing to evoke a sense of depth, movement, and emotion within her prints. Jess states; “It is my hope that by embracing a bold, graphic language, I can inspire a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation for the natural beauty that surrounds us.”
jessmckiernanprint.com.au
@jess.mckiernan.print
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