There she tends an experimental garden on the grounds of a former schoolyard — a site layered with histories of expulsion and resettlement that echo her own family's experience of forced migration. These distant histories find proximity in her situated practice, which brings together installation, performance and participatory formats with questions of land use, memory and ecological knowledge systems.

She studied Fine Art at the University of the Arts London (BA) and pursued further independent studies in ceramics, seed cultures, ethical farming and post-natural research in the USA and Europe. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Tulca Festival in Galway (Ireland) and in exhibition and project spaces in Berlin, Warsaw and New York.

Werktitel: Grenzmaterialien

Oriented in the space east and west on purpose, this new site-specific textile sculpture proposes a fourth abstract arch overlaid on the three existing ones at Kunsthalle Lausitz. Made from reclaimed domestic fabrics, discarded Tesla workwear worn by Polish commuters, and seeds sewn into its seams, the work gathers these 'border materials' and reconfigures them into a new proposition, an alternative landscape. The region's more recent histories of forced displacement on both sides of the Odra river are brought together with the artist's own family's histories of exile. The local and ancestral seeds present in the sculpture join these histories: rye and traditional grains from the region alongside Andean beans, corn and squash that Jess has carried and tends in her border garden, introducing a south into a territory defined by east and west. Unfinished at its edges and floating gently off the wall, the archway becomes a soft threshold that patchworks these abandoned histories into new ways of belonging together.