About

Jess Kidd is a Yorkshire based, multi-disciplinary artist, with a current focus on mixed media painting. She graduated in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London, in 2008. She experienced a prolonged period of serious illness in her mid 20s, resulting in her practice taking an unexpected back seat. Nevertheless, Jess's art has re-emerged recently, and she is thriving once again.

In 2023, Jess was awarded both the Scott Creative Arts Foundation, Emerging Artist Award and the Joan Day Painting Bursary by South Square Centre, Thornton, resulting in time to develop her practice and a two month solo exhibition.

After moving back home, Jess was captivated by the unique Pennine post-industrial landscape, she'd taken for granted as a child. She is inspired by art that provokes people to reconsider the familiar or mundane.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) informs both her creative process and her subject matter. She loves to experiment, play with, and manipulate materials, and is driven by a passionate intention to convey her interpretations of reality.

In order to connect to a wider audience Jess has exhibited in a variety of spaces, such as a dis-used department store in her hometown, Keighley; and the open air, UNESCO City of Film, Big Screen, in Centenary Square, Bradford. She aims to encourage celebration and appreciation of where we live, rather than apathy or negativity.

Like many northern post-industrial towns, Keighley has struggled for years with economic/social decline. Growing up here, Jess took for granted regular negative remarks about the town. Now as a returned adult, she wonders how these little habitual digs at this place, affect the lives living here.

Since Covid and experiencing unexpected grief, Jess has distilled the theories of CBT, into simply 'finding joy': whether through finding beauty in unexpected places or translating her love of colour, texture or composition into something she can share.