About the artist

Jess began creating work in 2005, first exhibiting her work in 2008, and has spent most of her time toiling over a table ever since. Under the pseudonym 23rd Key, she creates photo-realistic stencils and hand painted works, taking no short-cuts and cutting all her stencils by hand. With a background in Printmaking, Graphic Design, Audio Engineering and Architecture, she brings this knowledge into her work and in recent years has adapted to installing and hand painting large scale mural works without the use of stencils. Still in the early stages of her studio-based art career, she hand cuts each intricate layer, and this attention to detail has become a trademark of her work, winning her the Australian Stencil Art Prize in 2011, the World Stencil Art Prize in 2014, the Emerging Artist award at Forty-Five Downstairs in 2017 as well as inclusion in Sydney’s longest running charity auction event ‘Project 5’ with aMBUSH Gallery in 2014. Working with only 9 layers or fewer on any one piece, she doesn’t believe it’s the number of layers a stencil has that lends to her stunningly photo realistic images, but the amount of detail cut into each individual layer. Breaking ground in her medium, she is one of few stencil artists to incorporate 3D and free hand elements into her works and to create large scale murals both by hand painting as well as using stencils. The stencil cut murals have been a feature at Wall to Wall festival for consecutive years as well as in Brisbane for the Vibrant Laneways project. In 2011 23rd Key held her first solo show, ‘Skills to Pay the Bills’, showcasing her ground-breaking 3D works, coupled with her already renowned photo-realistic street scenes and portraits. She followed this with her second exhibition in 2014, at Juddy Roller, titled ‘Keezus’, which focused around the themes of the artists ego and the human condition; themes that were so vast that a second show ‘Keezus: The Second Coming’ developed and launched in February of 2017. Followed these shows was ‘Forever Home’ in 2019, and a body of work that had matured and developed upon the prior shows, taking a broader look at how culture is represented through architecture and the emotional ties we have to certain places through inexplicable familiarity. Having such a memorable style, it’s easy to distinguish her work from the rest, she is a jack of all trades, and a master of some.

Artworks

Archived