Jess Townsend: 22 mins : 05 secs in February

About the artist

Jess Townsend is a printmaking artist whose work seeks the extraordinary within the everyday, reaching toward fleeting moments that may already have shifted or disappeared. Memory and landscape run throughout her practice, exploring liminal spaces between land and sea, wild places, and timelines that move fluidly between past and present.

At the centre of her work is an engagement with process, where unexpected marks, textures, and transformations emerge through printmaking itself. Using pinhole photography as a starting point, Jess creates images that carry a living, shifting quality, building narratives that move between the visible and obscured, the remembered and imagined. Her works evoke parallel worlds shaped by childhood memory and by landscapes that are gradually altered and eroded over time.

Jess’s fascination with printmaking began in London while working in Intensive Care and studying at Goldsmiths. Following a move to Bristol, she became a member of Spike Print Studio, where she developed a particular focus on intaglio printmaking. Between 2017 and 2024, she served as Administrative Manager for Spike Print Studio while continuing to expand her own artistic practice.

Her current work explores themes of magical realism, drawing together memory, place, and atmosphere through layered print processes that blur the boundaries between observation, imagination, and recollection.