Artist Statement

Jessica Steele creates hand-cut paper collages using vintage print ephemera, primarily mid-century books and magazines. She is drawn to these materials for their distinctive colour palettes, shared visual language, and the ideas and histories embedded within their pages.

Her process is slow and intuitive, rooted in curiosity and exploration. She sources and catalogues paper materials before searching for fragments that catch her attention, building new relationships through careful cutting, layering, and arrangement. Ideas often reveal themselves through this process of discovery.

Jessica’s work explores themes of inner worlds, human interaction, and our relationship to the environments we inhabit. She is interested in how meaning shifts through surreal changes in scale and context, transforming familiar or mundane imagery into something strange, humorous, or evocative. Through these transformations, she invites viewers to look more closely at the world around them, their perceptions of it, and perhaps even themselves.

Biography

Jessica Steele is a collage artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds a BFA in Fibres from Concordia University and a Diploma of Fine Arts from Dawson College. Working with hand-cut vintage print materials, Jessica explores how meaning shifts when familiar imagery is separated from its original context and recombined into new relationships.

Her work has been exhibited across greater Halifax and is held in private collections in Canada and the U.S. In winter 2026, she served as Artist-in-Residence at Pavia Gallery, culminating in a solo exhibition. She was one of four emerging artists selected for the 2025–26 Visual Arts Nova Scotia Mentorship Program, working with artist Christopher Webb as her mentor.

Jessica and her work have been featured twice on CTV Morning Live Atlantic, and she was a guest on Blackout Podcast. She volunteers with Halifax Collage Collective, supporting accessible community collage programming.