Jessica Bell is a Vancouver artist who enjoys working in a variety of media, including paint, textile, and collage.

Bell, who was born in Montreal and has lived across the country, has been based in Vancouver for the past seven years and works out of a home studio near South Granville.

She holds an undergraduate degree in art history from the University of Calgary and plans to pursue a master of fine arts degree from the University of Ottawa this fall.

The Straight reached Bell by phone.

What kind of formal training do you have as an artist?

In a practical sense, in studio training, not very much. … At the time that I did my undergrad in art history it felt like I was kind of stepping back from my studio practice, but actually I think that the training that I got in looking at art and how it’s made and how it integrates in design and architecture was probably the best training I could have got. Looking at things from a historical perspective really taught me how to see and think.

And then practically speaking and technically speaking I’ve learned most of what I’ve learned through trial and error. I experiment wildly with materials. I do whatever I can get away with and what fails I don’t do again. I think that probably being a bit reckless that way and probably being a bit naive has been my greatest asset in my studio practice because I haven’t been afraid to do things I’ve been taught I shouldn’t do. I just kind of would go for it and I think trial and error and a lot of just intense studio time independently has been my biggest instructor, I guess.

What kind of media do you work in?

It varies. I’ve always come back to painting. Painting seems to be the thing that I’m always getting back to but I take related tangents all the time. I’ve heard myself described the most often lately as a collage artist. And in the traditional sense I’m not sure if that’s exactly true. When I think of traditional collage, I think of assembling found images from magazines or newspapers, or things like that and putting them together. And that’s something that I’ve never done. But what I have done is put together various media and I’ve always had a lot of curiosity with paper and cutting it up and taking things apart and putting them back together again. And so in that sense I think that is a trait that carries through in all my work.

Most of my paintings do have some element of paper incorporated into them. They are mixed media. Also they usually have a lot of drawing elements. And then related to that too I have this whole other realm of work that I’ve made in textile. I guess it’s most often referred to, when it’s not paper, it’s not referred to as collage but more as assemblage. I’ve put together and constructed pieces out of fabric entirely. I’ve knit them and then added construction into them. That’s been a significant part of my practice and I think that’s actually the things that make my paintings more interesting. When I come back to them I think about the practice of painting differently because of experimentation in different media.

What interests you about working in a variety of media?

Materials have always been really interesting to me. Like, a piece of paper, or a piece of fibre, a piece of fabric, each of those materials has their own inherent quality. Because they’re made by someone else’s hand or a machine they have a sort of natural history to them and that’s something that I’ve always been curious about. That’s always a starting point for me, is finding a material that I really love that has qualities that I find appealing for a variety of reasons…. I’ll always find a way to try and incorporate that into my work.

The other reason I kind of cycle through materials, one to another, it’s just a means of process. I think when I’ve painted exclusively for a while I get stuck in a way of thinking and if I can move into a different type of material for even a short time and then go back to painting, I find that it’s a way of kind of breaking out of my routine and changing my way of thinking, even about painting. For me, moving from material to material has always been a way of kind of propelling my practice forward, and changing the things I make, and ultimately thinking differently about painting. That’s always what it seems to come back to for me.

Portrait of An Artist is a regular feature on Straight.com that profiles local visual artists. Suggest an artist to profile in the comments section below or by sending a message via Twitter to @thomsonreporter.