We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jessica Tevik. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jessica below.

Jessica, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Much of my work, in general, revolves around the existential experience of being human, being queer, being neurodivergent, and being amid radical, exponential climate transformation and political unrest. The most meaningful project for me as an artist is still developing but has been released in pieces. My recent multimedia painting series entitled “The Red Sun” has explored this refraction of the inner world and outer culture in an evolving way while living under the looming “red sun”. The title refers to the common element found among the paintings: a block printed red sun on paper recycled from some scraps of a printmaking series. The works commonly also include other mixed media with vivid matte black strokes/textures that are then paired with golden-painted overlays and textures.

While living and working in California, I lost my home, my job, and my community all in a matter of hours due to a historic wildfire. As someone who had closely studied sustainability and agriculture during my first degree, this ignited an extra spark of wildness and urgency in my life that had already been planted there as my education evolved. One of the things that haunted me about that fateful day and living in California during wildfire season was the bright red takeover of the sun.

At the time, I wasn’t sure what to do and I had spent the last couple of years in California, transitioning my focus from agriculture to massage therapy/the healing arts as I had been introduced to it through friends and always been intrigued to learn and have a way to directly help others. I had been in the process of finishing my massage therapy training when the fire hit and the school was unfortunately also burned. Thankfully I was able to continue my studies and started practicing massage around California, and lived nomadically around the area that I practiced in at the time.

Later in life, after another series of unfortunate events and injuries and feeling that something was missing, I decided to go back to school for art. It was a love that had always trailed alongside like a voice that wouldn’t go away but always felt in conflict with other things, including sustainability. There, I was opened up to a world of beauty and things that humanity has created/imagined that have since repeatedly changed the entirety of my inner world. All of this while feeling the looming exponentiation of climate upheaval around the world and fearing for the very loss of what makes us, us.

Photography and book arts are deeply rooted influences in my work as well. My paintings, in many ways, were inspired by looking for another way to expand the techniques I apply to bookmaking and printmaking onto canvas and liberate them. Photography is present in several of the paintings in the series in the form of pasted torn scraps printed for other projects. For me, it is a way of witnessing, collecting, and honoring that which is beautiful and/or memorable. Even the smallest of textures in the crannies of cities call me to collect them at times.

This series, and the exhibition I plan to evolve it into one day, is at the heart of my practice as an artist, and I believe the rest of what I create will be influenced in some way, shape, or form by it.

Jessica, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a queer interdisciplinary artist, massage therapist, and earth steward. A deeply rooted relationship with the earth and a passion for all of the wonderful expressions of the world keeps me going. My creative work is deeply inspired by the intertwining of my love for the earth, my passions for and roots in the study of physics, massage therapy, art, sustainable agriculture, climate science, and more.

After spending several years traveling and farming during and after my first college degree, I settled down in a community that had formed around a local hot springs. I lived and worked at the hot springs and attended their massage school in my free time. Unfortunately, after a couple of years and a week before I was about to hopefully begin working as a massage therapist full time, my home, my massage school, and my workplace were all burned in a large California wildfire.

After that, my entire life was reorganized and transformed. This led me to complete more bodywork training elsewhere and I lived nomadically around the coast of Northern California while practicing massage locally. Eventually I ended up getting an invitation to join old friends on a farm in Colorado. After some wonderful, unfortunate, and transformative events and some injuries that made it difficult to carry on with massage, I eventually returned to school for art as I felt it was the stone left unturned.

Photography and art have followed me my entire life, but I never let them fully take the reins until I felt I had nothing else to turn to. They were my salvation for a roller coaster of a childhood. I spent most of high school in the various art rooms, especially the dark room, and would wander for photos whenever I got the chance.

My grandfather was responsible for putting a camera in my hand, and I have been fascinated ever since. Art school helped me realize that photography and art have more dimensions than I ever realized. Ultimately, my wish is to inspire deeper nourishing relationships with nature and others and to empower action in sustainability and radical care of self/other/earth.

My creative work is largely interdisciplinary, including but not limited to explorations in photography, poetry, book arts, printmaking, design, collage, digital art, and acrylic painting. I focus almost entirely on the natural world to express a deep personal reverence and a desire to share my passion for protecting it. However, I am also often inspired by abstraction and the often hidden beauty in urban environments. I try to incorporate as many found/recycled materials as possible because sustainability and respect for nature are foundational to my practice and intentions as an artist.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goals as a creative have two different facets that I’m trying to marry as much as possible. One is to try to find effective and inspiring ways to communicate a love for the earth and the desperate need to care for it as climate change looms over our heads. The second is to document life and try to explore and express fascinating, beautiful, difficult, or complex facets of the human experience and ways of communicating outside of language.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

My answer to this question somewhat ties in hand in hand with my answer to the other, but for me, being an artist at its root is simply being a part of the creation of life itself when I am truly present to let it in is the most rewarding feeling. I feel that creativity allows me to dive down a rabbit hole of showing up as a witness and anchor to life and expression in its purest form.

It is easy sometimes to get lost in the world with capitalistic bustle, unprecedented changes and experiences exponentiating what seems like every hour, and societal pressure to fit a neat box. By attempting to transmute that experience, I’m regaining control and creating something I find beautiful and/or thought-provoking. I am also trying to alchemize and communicate a message of education, hope, and/or action around actively participating in the betterment of this world as well as the protection of/care for the earth.

Whether or not anyone remembers my name, I’ve created something and contributed something out of a unique subset of passions, experiences, and visual expressions like it is its own branch of a new language.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jessicatevikart.com
• Instagram: @jessicatevik_art

Image Credits

All images are original and credited to me, Jessica Tevik.