We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jessica & Eliana a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jessica & Eliana, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Aside from launching our small business, Girls at the End of the World is by far our most meaningful project, to date. This collection, or series, deals with issues of feminism, global warming, and political conflict. It connects fine art with our jewelry designs and printed furnishings in a clear and visually inspiring way. On a broader scale, GATEOTW appeals to audiences of fine art, fashion, and interior design with one overarching message.
Jessica: It all started with sculptural paintings during Donald Trump’s first term as President, depicting him as Breughel’s Fall of Icarus while the girls shoot at him with arrows trying to escape the doom. The paintings that followed represented similar allegorical situations, sometimes based on old master history paintings or from my own imagination. Inspired by the narrative, I created two hand-drawn prints in the toile style to be made into a wallpaper and various soft furnishings, like curtains and cushions. From this print came the idea of the divers helmet pendant that we named The Aquanaut’s Amulet. Each piece of jewelry serves as a wearable manifestation of the same drawings. In an effort to offer smaller, more affordable and collaborative paintings, I began making 4×6-inch oil paintings on yupo based on reference photos that had been sent to me. I painted the girls in green suits expressing the phenomenon of love and support between women, both romantically and platonically. As an extension of the initial, larger paintings in the series, the women are connected through an allegorical catastrophe. The fabrication of the green suits were inspired by my experience working in the fashion industry, the color green representing rebirth and the suit being a futuristic material that protects the girls from all the elements they find themselves facing.
Eliana: We wanted to present and market a collection that included all the different things that Jessica can create, and the stories that they tell. As an artist and creative administrator trying to make a living off of our work, it was especially crucial to us that not one medium or audience be left out. It is important to both of us that consumers of our product be able to connect with the vision and idea as well as with the materiality of the object.
Jessica & Eliana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
J. Hargreaves Industry, or JHi, is our women-owned and artist-run small business based in New York! We are a pan-generational duo, selling one of a kind jewelry, art, and soft furnishings that are connected to the narratives of JHi’s larger fine art practices. Our founder, Jessica Hargreaves, is an installation artist and the owner of Mother-in-Law’s Gallery in Germantown, New York. Co-founder and Studio Manager, Eliana Shoffner, is a creative based in Brooklyn, New York. The goal of JHi is to foster a new environment, or industry, that combines fine art sensibility with wearable, usable objects. Each piece of jewelry is hand-carved from wax by Jessica and brought to life by artisans local to New York City’s jewelry district.
We met at Sephora in Williamsburg in August of 2023. Jessica was searching for a new lipstick to replace her favorite one. Eliana was a manager at the time and approached her, excited to help find what she was looking for. When Jessica held up the lipstick to give her a better look at the color, Eliana immediately noticed a ring on her finger with so many embedded stones that it was hard to look away. Eliana admired the ring and Jessica responded with, “I made it!” We chatted in the middle of the busy store about Jessica’s career as an artist, Eliana’s passion for the arts, and bonded over a vision where art and fashion could coexist within the same practice. After exchanging information, we met for coffee about a month later. Ideas were revised, mood boards were made, and in October of 2024 we launched J. Hargreaves Industry.
Jessica Hargreaves, Founder:
I was born and raised in South London, and earned a Bachelor’s Degree with Honors in Fashion and Textile Design at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London). After working, miserably, in fashion and illustration in NYC I went back to college and received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
My art practice has always contained a narrative element that allegorizes whatever I am processing emotionally, be that political or personal. My love of fashion and adornment has persisted. This love is expressed in my installations as a desire to make environments that, at first glance, are decorative and visually appealing, but eventually reveal elements that can be humorous and satirical or dark and disturbing.
As part of my installation practice, I started painting and sculpting figures onto found objects including screens, mirrors and chairs. Inspired by the vintage animal jewelry of Cartier and David Webb, I took a wax carving class in 2014. The jewelry that came out of this was more raw and brutal than much of the jewelry I admired. Although my practice has become more refined over the years, it is important to me that there is a direct through line from my painting, drawing and sculpture to my jewelry and furnishings.
Eliana Shoffner, Co-Founder
I moved from Texas to New York City in 2019 to pursue, what I believed, would be a career in fashion. After exploring Global and Visual Studies during my undergraduate years, I received a Master’s Degree in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design in May of 2023. Much of my research surrounded the art of adornment, both visual and sociological. I often studied artists who worked with textiles or found objects as their medium. I studied and questioned fashion and art exhibitions and what galleries were doing to support artists.
My studies, coupled with my illuminating experience interning at New York Fashion Week and years of working in fashion and beauty retail, made it clear that the worlds of high fashion, art institutions, and cooperations were not where I wanted to invest my creative energy and labor. With this insight and motivation, I started collaborating with non-profits like Brooklyn Fashion Week and the Brooklyn Style Foundation. With the support of my friends and a small grant, we fostered our own community organization, NYC Community Wardrobe. We gave communities a space to donate and obtain secondhand clothing for free, and had a ton of fun doing it. I worked my way through college as a Sales & Service Leader at Sephora, using my network and resources to cast a wider net of mutual aid and artist support in Brooklyn.
About six months of business planning went by and I made the decision to leave Sephora, working full-time on the launch of JHi. Difficult as it may be to sustain a life in New York City as a young creative, I wholeheartedly believe in the values and fresh vision that JHi stands for.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Negative experiences with art galleries and institutions have inspired us to create our own operation selling artist-made work. Because of this, we have a two-part mission. The first is to be able to successfully make a living off of our own work by remaining authentic and transparent in our creative process and production. We want to be an example for independent artists struggling to make ends meet by selling their own work, or feeling like they have to sacrifice an element of their creative practice to be palatable to the fine art world or to the average consumer. Achieving this will get us one step closer to the second part. The next step in our plan is to create an extension of JHi that would act as a selling platform for various multi-hyphenate artists, called Some Other Future. Once we prove that it is not only possible but essential, we want to reallocate autonomy to any artists who haven’t quite found their place in a single industry or medium. Supporting, sharing, and shopping from J. Hargreaves Industry are just a few ways to help us achieve our goal, and to help other independent artists to do the same.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
We believe that the consumption habits of art, jewelry, and interior design enthusiasts should be more supportive of small business and independent artists. As a society, we should consider how morally aligned we are with brands that we shop and promote. Accessibility, affordability, and aesthetic influences tend to be the driving forces for a purchase. We as a society are quick to overlook products that are harmful to the environment or that perpetuate unethical labor practices if it means our lives are made easier or prettier in some way.
It is hard to fight consumer habits in the system we find ourselves in.
We can better support artists by understanding their practices and communicating the methods of these practices to the consumer. Artists have been creating inside a hostile system for so long. The ones who survive are not necessarily the most interesting. We need to encourage consumers to question how and why things are priced the way they are and to really think about what their financial investment means. So many artists and business owners have come up with incredible ideas that have been overshadowed by the successful marketing campaigns of larger entities with huge resources.
It is still possible to use social media platforms to discover people making amazing things and then share these findings with your online community. We need to change our algorithms and realign ourselves with the idea of communion. These efforts may not change the system all at once, but they might just foster a creative ecosystem that thrives from within.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jhargreavesindustry.myshopify.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/jhargreavesindustry
Image Credits
Photos by Eliana Shoffner