"Sustainability is achieved when a web of individuals sense, respond, and adapt as a community" - Q&A with Artist Jai Bess

If you are a regular follower of Comestible, then you know that visually I am drawn to graphic, visual artwork, jn particular black and white. Whether it’s papercut illustration or printmaking, I love the bold nature of work that plays with positive and negative space.

I also love anything that’s at the intersection of art and food, and I am thrilled to be able to bring you a Q&A with Jai Bess, who is a linocut and block print artist based in the UK. Her work focused on food, sustainability, and resilience, and here we learn a little bit more about her art, process, and what keeps her inspired.

Tell us a little bit about who Jai is.

I’m Jai.

I live and work in a wonky cottage in Somerset, England, where I tend chickens and bees, grow some food and try to raise conscientious children.

I believe in taking back power from systems that don’t serve us or the environment, and that space to grow, whether as an individual or community, should be a basic human right. As a family we strive for daily acts of resistance, however small; valuing the local and the seasonal over uniformity and availability.

Sometimes I print things too.

Have you always been an artist?

I come from a line of potters and as a child I was going to be an author-artist and part time vet. Mostly this involved illustrating the covers of the books I would one day write and rescuing mice and shrews from the cat.

But I got side-tracked along the way and ended up at medical school, where I failed my second year. I am a big believer in the value of failure. So I rethought a few things and eventually found myself back on this path, the one I know now I had always wanted to be on. So no, I haven’t always been an artist, but I am glad to be here now.

What got you interested in print making?

I was given a basic printmaking kit for my birthday one year. Cheap roller, bad flaky inks and a single clunky gauge. I carved leaning on the back of a medical textbook sat on my tiny student bed and forgot to reverse the text. It was glorious. I’ve never stopped.

It is the accessibility of it as a craft that I love best. Of course you can use fine papers and expensive inks, but you can also create something wonderful with the most basic tools.

The long history of it as a skill also thrills me, the idea that the fundamentals have remained unchanged through the years. You can follow it back through the history and politics and stories it carries.

Can you share a little bit about your process? Where do you go for inspirations? How do you go from idea to concept?

I draw a lot. Constantly. Not good or pretty drawings, mostly scribbles and shapes. It is a running narrative of things I have thought or seen or liked. Words too.

I am a covetous person. I hoard all scraps of joy or imagery that excites me, I can’t let them go. As a child I remember reading about a writer’s toolkit, a notebook filled with the words and phrases and lines that resonate, and I’ve never left that behind.

Most of it resides in sketchbooks never to be seen again, but when I’m looking for what I want to do next, it can normally be found there.

I often prefer a sketch to the final piece. They’re alive and have a spontaneity that often ends up hammered out in the finishing. So whilst I’m often thrilled with the first print I’ve pulled from a block, it always come with a sense of loss. I tread lightly when deciding what to print up.

In a lot of your work there is a theme of food, whether it’s individual items of produce, or larger pieces dedicated to the importance of land. Why are you drawn to this intersection of food and art?

Learning to cook, grow and eat together is as important as reading and writing. And at a time of such uncertainty, there is a magic in raising a garden and planting food, it presumes a future.

Being custodian to a patch of land, however small, is a responsibility. It is always political. Even when we were renting, we planted food and bulbs, knowing that even if we weren’t there to reap those rewards, we would be leaving small legacies in our wake.

I can’t leave that feeling alone. Growing and feeding my family feels like a pilgrimage in this season of my life, so I suppose it is inevitable that it is what I find myself drawing time and time over.

The work that you share is so powerful. What do you hope that people get out of your artwork?

Someone shared the quote recently “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible” (Toni Cade Bambara). We live in a world where even freedom to save seeds is affected by corporations. But sustainability is achieved when a web of individuals sense, respond, and adapt as a community.

I suppose my hope is that my work adds to the voices that remind us to turn to the land and to find empowerment in the rich and complex feeling of being part of an environment that you look after and, in turn, that looks after you.

What is your current favorite meal you have been making lately?

I have two small children in the house, so we eat a lot of pesto. But pesto has the joy of the seasons, we have worked our way through a freezer filled with Spring’s wild garlic pesto and we are filling it again with Autumn’s parsley pesto to see us through the Winter. I can forgive the endless pasta nights with pesto so good.

But when I get to choose, roasted squash on flatbread. Greens, a cheese, a hummus maybe too. But always roasted squash, good oil and flatbread. Secretly though, I am always holding out for the purple sprouting broccoli.

Who/what are you inspired by right now?

That list is hard to narrow down, there are so many voices that resonate right now.

I love the artwork of Rosanna Morris. I don’t have the words to describe how important and lovely her work is. Cat of the Olive Trees and the Moon on Instagram is able to share far more eloquently than I ever could how radical the act of growing your own food and medicine is. Her garden, despite the lack of water, is a beautiful space.

The thing I find myself most inspired by at the moment, and am constantly scribbling into my sketchbooks, are placards. The Climate Strike placards were a magnificent example of the power of art – scribbled puns in sharpie on cereal packets, larger group pieces, the words, the imagery. They’re all glorious, important and valuable.

And finally, Ursula le Guin. Anything I could possibly be thinking about, she has always written something perfect about.

You can follow Jai on Instagram.

All images provided by the artist.

Want to learn more about artists working at the intersection of food, art, and land? Check out our Art section.