Jessie Paige Studio

My art practice is rooted in a deep curiosity about the human condition—its quiet truths, layered stories, and the emotional texture that shapes who we are. Circle Drawings began as a simple exercise: for 100 days, I drew circles. What started as a meditation on gesture and mark-making soon became something much more layered.

As a photographer, I’ve often felt a quiet longing for the tactile immediacy of drawing and painting. The act of drawing circles—over and over—became a daily ritual, one that felt both grounding and deeply personal. As a mother raising two young daughters with autism, I began to notice how this repetitive act mirrored one of the hallmark characteristics of autism: restricted and repetitive behaviors. But it wasn’t mimicry—it was resonance.

In the practice of drawing, I found calm. During moments of high stress, emotional volatility, or sensory overload in our household, I turned to the quiet motion of circles. My hand moved almost automatically, and in that movement I experienced what my children so often seek—neurological regulation through repetition. The circles became my own stimming, my way of self-soothing, of staying present.

As part of the 100 Day Project, I shared my drawings daily on Instagram, engaging not just with the marks I was making, but with the process itself. As a photographer, I couldn’t help but document the drawings in context—capturing not only the paper and pencil, but the light, the table, the background noise of a life unfolding. Two parallel projects emerged: the small, delicate, quiet drawings—and the photographic documentation of the moment, the environment, the unspoken narrative behind each day’s drawing.

Circle Drawings are artifacts—of ritual, of motherhood, of repetition as a language. They hold space for both the meditative act and the chaotic moment it interrupts. They are, ultimately, a visual meditation on control, surrender, and what it means to witness and be witnessed in the repetition.

Phoebe & Lucy began as a quiet practice—photographing my daughters as they moved through their days. What started as a way to hold onto small moments became an evolving body of work about presence, relationship, and the layered experience of raising two children whose world reshaped my own.

Autism is not the subject of this work, but it is the atmosphere. It is the air we breathe, the rhythm of our days, the lens through which everything else is felt. It is how we communicate, how we retreat, how we try again. It shows up in silence, in repetition, in deep focus, in unexpected joy. It lives in both the constraint and the freedom. Rather than framing autism as something we manage, I have come to understand it as the terrain we move through together.

In this series, I am both participant and observer. I am a mother, living inside the scenes I photograph—and an artist, responding to them. I don’t stand outside of these images. I am implicated in them, emotionally and visually. This work isn’t about documentation so much as it is about relationship. It’s about how attention becomes care. How repetition becomes rhythm. How quiet moments can tell the whole story.

These photographs are as much about what’s happening as they are about what’s felt. They explore the blur between motherhood and artmaking, between caregiving and creative seeing. I aim to create a sense of place—not just geographic, but emotional. A place where small gestures matter. Where presence is enough. Where difference is not explained, but witnessed.

Phoebe & Lucy is about growing up. About growing alongside. About making a life inside a world not built for us, and loving the world we’ve built instead.

Wellspring is a body of work rooted in day-to-day life—quiet observations of home, family, and the objects that occupy our spaces. These photographs draw from the familiar: the toys left in the yard, the curve of a garden hose, the light that catches on a tricycle. I’m drawn to how ordinary things—once held with care and then left behind—begin to take on a quiet gravity. They become markers of presence and absence, of memory and transition.

Through selective focus and a slowed, observational pace, the images invite a sense of reverie. The domestic landscape becomes both archive and altar—holding not only what has happened, but what is happening and what is still forming. I see these objects not as static, but as carriers of layered meaning—personal relics shaped by time, gesture, and use.

In Wellspring, I’m exploring how the seemingly mundane holds space for memory, identity, and continuity. The images are less about documentation and more about attention—about how place, presence, and care quietly shape the story of who we are becoming.

Quietus was born in the aftermath of personal rupture—the sudden loss of my mother, followed closely by the end of my marriage. In the silence that followed, I set out alone, spending six weeks camping in the forests of Northern California. There, I began photographing my surroundings. What started as a way to occupy my time gradually became a vital expression of grief, healing, and inner inquiry. I continued photographing in remote locations for what became a three-year journey.

This work is rooted in my search to understand how the mind survives immense loss—how we move through trauma not in clear steps, but through fragments, stillness, and repetition. The woods became a space where I could disappear and still be held. Shielded by trees, surrounded by shadow and light, I found moments of calm—of being with my thoughts and the questions I didn’t yet know how to answer.

My images are visual manifestations of this internal terrain. The dark, ambiguous black-and-white prints mirror the altered perception of grief—how memory can blur, how scale and space can shift when we are inside pain. Through selective focus and distortion, I recreate the sensation of disorientation that comes with loss. Photographing became both an act of reflection and a way of asking: Where am I now? Who was I before? What remains?

In Quietus, I immerse myself in landscapes that echo my emotional state—cold air, filtered light, the sharp scent of trees, the near-silence of the forest floor. These sensory elements are not just aesthetic—they are somatic. They are the language my body could understand when words failed.

Ultimately, this work is an investigation of the human condition through the lens of solitude, grief, and transformation. It is about the space between ruin and repair, and the quiet ways we begin again.

This piece is made up of 60 Polaroids, taken during a six-week road trip through Northern California. Each image was made in a moment of pause—of looking, noticing, being.

I’ve long been drawn to the ways we document our lives, especially within families. Polaroids carry a unique kind of intimacy: immediate, physical, imperfect. They are both image and artifact—an instant archive, a souvenir of feeling.

These photographs are not arranged to tell a linear story. Instead, they sit together like fragments of recollection—linked not by chronology, but by atmosphere. The way memory works. What we hold onto. What fades.

May – June 2006 (60 Polaroids) reflects my ongoing interest in the texture of memory and the quiet rituals of observation. Like much of my work, it exists between presence and reflection, experience and artifact, image and impression.

This series emerged in the quiet, ungraspable space that followed the loss of my mother. As I moved through grief, I became drawn to the nature of memory—how it distorts, softens, reshapes. How it holds both presence and absence at once.

Working with a pinhole camera, I embraced the long exposures, the softness, the blur. These choices were not just aesthetic—they mirrored the way memories live inside us: indistinct at the edges, layered with both truth and invention. The images reflect how we remember—not in sharp frames, but in fragments, gestures, atmospheres.

Grouped in single images and in sequences, these photographs mimic how we assemble experience: not as a linear record, but as linked moments that form the emotional architecture of our past. The work is not about accuracy. It is about the feeling of remembering. About the way light moves when you close your eyes. About the stillness that echoes long after something is gone.