Jess Wheeler

Jess Wheeler
North Wales, United Kingdom

Jess Wheeler spent her twenties as a London-based set designer, moving between set work, floristry and decorative arts without quite landing on one discipline. In 2019 she went to live on a farm in North Wales, and the move changed everything — suddenly she had workshop space, raw materials and a landscape that became impossible to ignore. The pandemic, which stole her usual set design work entirely, gave her the time to start translating that landscape into something new.

Her first piece was practical: a pair of oak leaf candle sconces she wanted for her own fireplace and couldn't find anywhere, so she taught herself to make them, learning steelwork from a local blacksmith who walked her through the process. That self-taught beginning grew into a genuine metalworking practice — brass, cast bronze, plaster and iron, shaped into sconces, candlesticks, mobiles and chandeliers, every piece drawing on the botanical forms she walks past daily in the Welsh countryside. She later apprenticed informally with metalworker Stan Jankowski, absorbing technique the way she's absorbed everything else in her career: through doing rather than formal training.

We carry Jess Wheeler because her work has a genuine sense of place. These pieces couldn't have come from a studio in a city — they carry Snowdonia's leaves and seasons quite literally, cast directly into brass, a highly sustainable material.

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Image via of House & Garden UK https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/gallery/jess-wheeler-studio