In the studio with Jess Wheeler as she crafts her otherworldly brass lighting
Jess Wheeler is something of a polymath. For the past year, she has thrown herself into metalwork, crafting sconces and chandeliers out of brass, which she cuts and bends into shape with a strength that belies the intricacy of the finished form. But in the preceding years, she had done everything from set design for fashion shoots to art direction for a rare orchid nursery. ‘My approach isn’t constrained by materials,’ says Jess, who now works from a barn at the foothills of the Berwyn Mountains in north east Wales – one of a handful of outbuildings that accompany the rented farmhouse she moved to last March.
Jess grew up in Suffolk and spent her childhood drawing and ‘making dens out of moss and stone’. She studied art at school – ‘it was the only subject I felt good at’ – which led to an art foundation course at Leeds Arts University. There she decided to focus on illustration, enrolling on a three-year degree course at the University of Edinburgh’s College of Art, which was was ‘as much about drawing, as it was about building things’. She paid her way by taking on freelance commissions – everything from painting murals to designing logos for brands. ‘It was all just word of mouth,’ she says.
Having left university in 2015, she decided to ‘ramp it up a notch’ and started assisting floral and fashion set designers. ‘I loved learning something new every day,’ says Jess, who has designed a collection of ceramics and table linen for Alex Eagle and recently created a series of hand-painted floral trays for Edition 94. ‘Nature has always been a very big theme in what I do,’ she explains. ‘I want my pieces to elevate everyday life.’
Her brass sconces grew out of this spirit after she moved to Wales and felt that the walls on either side of her fireplace could do with embellishment. She had a metal candleholder she had picked up from the Golborne Road market, W10, a few years earlier and decided that now was the time to try her hand at metalwork. Armed with the candleholder, she asked a local farrier to teach her the rudiments of welding and steel work. After a few days, she had an idea for a sconce with a J-shaped frame adorned with metal oak leaves. ‘The fields around our house are studded with oak trees, so they were an obvious basis for the design,’ explains Jess.
Steel was, however, not quite right and so she decided to experiment with brass: ‘It’s beautiful in its raw form, but it’s also one of the most recycled materials in the world.’ A friend put her in touch with a local metalworker, Stan Jankowski, who mainly makes weather vanes. Over the course of the next few months, he taught her how to solder – the process of joining metals together – using, in this case, silver. Her sconces began to take shape, with the frames created from rods of brass and the intricate leaves cut out from sheets of brass using a jigsaw, before being bent into shape using pliers. The challenge comes in getting the position right for the leaves, which she solders onto the frame. ‘I want them to look as if they’re floating in air,’ she explains. ‘There was a lot of trial and error to get the shape right.’
In December 2020, Jess tentatively showed some samples – a single sconce and a double – to Amanda Brooks, the founder of Cotswold lifestyle store Cutter Brooks, whom she had met through her styling and floral design work. Amanda loved them and immediately put them up on the wall; they made their debut a week later in a Christmas shoot of her house for the House & Garden website. Amanda put in an order and Jess spent the next three months making 40 sconces: they sold out in under three hours. ‘It all felt quite mad,’ recalls the designer, who has since created candelabra and chandeliers. This month, she has teamed up with Amanda on a two-week pop-up (until November 14) – an ode to oak trees, which have inspired not just the metal pieces made by Jess but also her table linen and napkin ring designs.
She says metalwork has captivated her: ‘I would like to experiment with different metals, such as copper, and take on commissions. There is something about being here in Wales that has given me so much more creative freedom.’
