About
What I’m looking for: I’m interested in making pictures for both fiction and non-fiction publications for children and adults. I’m especially interested in picture books and joyfully illustrated non-fiction texts.
Who I am: I’m an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist, writer and collaborator. I move fluidly between, painting, drawing, mixed media, animating, writing, creating set designs and working as a home décor product designer. I have many years behind me doing contract artwork – from textbook illustrations to window displays for shops. I’m a full-time visual artist.
I think of making art as an act of listening – to space, to other people, to my materials. Illustrating excites me because I experience it as an act of listening and responding to what I hear in text.
What makes it nice to work with me: I’m friendly, meet deadlines, take feedback well, and am adept in many mediums and many styles. I’m good at seeing the big picture and pivoting when necessary. I understand the artistic process very well, and trust it.
Why I want to illustrate: Over many years of doing contract drawings and product design, I’ve realized that my love for children and telling stories with images gives me great joy. I’m ready for a new adventure with my pens, pencils, paint, and scissors.
To learn more about me, please feel free to explore my website, and my Instagram portfolios where you can learn more about my publications, my design work and my visual art.
A little more detail, in the third person: Jessica Joy Hiemstra is an award-winning multi-disciplinary artist, writer and collaborator. She moves easily between, painting, animating, writing, creating set designs and working as a home décor product designer. She works in a variety of mediums on many kinds of surfaces - from watercolour and thread on paper to acrylic on acetate to plastic sewn into canvas, to giant paintings on outdoor walls. From poetry to children's books to large-scale installations for plays, Jessica thinks of making art as an act of listening – to space, to other people, to her materials. They say an adventure is a story you don’t know the ending of – and it’s with this approach Jessica squares off with whatever she’s making. In the words of Azar Nafisi, Jessica believes “Art is as useful as bread”. One of the things people often ask her is “what’s the difference between all the things you do?” Jessica doesn’t distinguish much between her mediums. Instead she chooses the best medium for exploring whichever question, concern or exaltation is most pressing to her in the moment - from delight in the body to sorrow and anger at how poorly we care for our world and each other. Sometimes she uses words, sometimes pencil, sometimes paint. Jessica likes what Paul Klee once said about art – that one eye sees, the other feels. It is through making that Jessica feels she can ask what it means to be human, even to be a good one.
Among other chapbooks, essay collections, and appearances in journals, Jessica’s has three full-length trade collections of poetry that she’s illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Pedlar Press, 2016; Self Portrait without a Bicycle, Biblioasis, 2012; Apologetic for Joy, 2011. Her most recent set design won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in the World produced by Pencil Kit Productions (2018), directed by Claren Grosz. Her artwork has been exhibited in Australia and North America. Most recently (January 2021), she was honoured with second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, a collaboration between herself and photographer Paul David Esposti, called “Translating Cormorants”, an animation of cormorants in flight over Lake Ontario (the Leading Sea) where she lives.
Jessica’s storybook world of a group of animals who live in a forest has been brought to life in a line of Home Décor products called Eric and Eloise. These products are collected and sold worldwide. Her storybooks (Eric and Eloise, While the Forest is Sleeping and Charlie in Spring (forthcoming, 2023)) are sustainably printed by women’s cooperatives in Nepal. Jessica writes, illustrates, designs and distributes these books.
Right now Jessica is looking forward to the publication of a collection of essays in conversation with the art of Claire Wilks (Exile Editions, 2024), creating a set with paper and cloth for composer Tristan Zaba’s musical performance Here be Sirens at the Tranzac Club in Toronto (2023), and working with the employees at an insurance office to create a mural using recycled house paint and plastic for Earth Day (April 2023!).