Jessey Jansen is a visual artist and writer working across painting, drawing, photography, and design. Her work explores observation, process, place, and the often-unseen connections between people and their environments. She is the author of Fair Street: My Road to Voice of Maasai and founder of Voice of Maasai, a creative collaboration with artists and musicians in Tanzania spanning more than two decades.
About
Creativity has always been a way for me to make sense of the world. My practice moves between drawing, painting, collage, photography, design, and writing. I see these not as separate disciplines, but as different ways of observing, interpreting, and making connections.
Printmaking has had a lasting influence on the way I work. It taught me to value preparation, repetition, layering, and the gradual emergence of an image. That way of thinking continues throughout my practice, often allowing process and materials to reveal something I could not have anticipated at the outset.
My earlier work explored civic dialogue and social mobility through visual art and design, eventually leading me to Tanzania and the creation of Voice of Maasai, a long-term collaboration with musicians, artists, and storytellers spanning more than two decades. Those relationships reshaped how I think about creativity, authorship, and the importance of trust, collaboration, and time.
Today, my visual work ranges widely in subject and form, from close observations of the natural world to explorations of pattern, place, memory, and connection. I am drawn to what can be discovered through looking closely: the things we see, the things we overlook, and sometimes the things we only imagine we see.
The work may take different forms, but the impulse remains consistent. I make things to pay attention, to understand something a little better, and to discover what might emerge when I stay with an idea long enough.