NO DIGNITY
A MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROJECT SPANNING ILLUSTRATION, FASHION, GRAFFITI, AND INSTALLATION, DEVELOPED BETWEEN 2021–2025
NO DIGNITY is an ongoing world-building project that brings together multiple strands of Jessica's practice. Rather than treating illustration, fashion, and installation as isolated disciplines, the work allows them to bleed into one another, creating a shared visual and political language rooted in protest, graffiti, and subcultural DIY practices. Images become garments, garments become performance, and performance becomes documentation. Across the project, recurring themes of women’s empowerment, resistance, and creative rebellion thread through every medium. This approach reflects Jessica's instinctive, non-hierarchical way of making, where ideas evolve through movement across materials, spaces, and bodies.
ILLUSTRATIONS AND BOOK
NO DIGNITY is a project which I began 4 years ago. It is a collection of previously unseen work, which was started in the January lockdown of 2021. Created in a period where public frustrations towards the government were high due to lockdown restrictions, police failures surrounding violence against women and the anti-protest bill.
Restricted from the outside, I found inspiration flicking through old copies of Bizarre magazine. Now in a world of cancel culture and ever-increasing online shadow banning, such content in a physical form seem like forbidden artefacts.
NO DIGNITY mixes inspiration from old school fetish illustrations, album imagery, tattoo art, punk zines, film stills, anti-style graffiti, female hip hop artists, with hints of protest; using collage, spray paint, marker pen and ink, which was then adapted into a digital format.
Fascinated and excited by the tensions between censorship, body positivity, sexual liberation, and exploitation, my work explores the raw nature of these issues through unapologetic female protagonists. Taking imagery catered towards the stereotypical male gaze and appropriating them into a version where women take ownership of their identity in an unashamed way.
As an obsessive record collector, it felt only right to design my own album artwork and package this book inside a custom record sleeve. Each package also includes two posters:
– A 12" x 12" FUCK SEXISM IN GRAFF print
– A fold-out NO DIGNITY poster
There are also 6 x limited edition packages each including a hand-illustrated vinyl record — a one-off piece of art in itself.
EXHIBITION / EVENT
Spanning roughly seven years of work, the NO DIGNITY exhibition brought together illustration, textiles, protest boards, clothing, moving image projection, and large-scale graffiti pieces, of which were painted in the venue to form the catwalk backdrop. The event was conceived as a one-night-only opening, followed by a few additional days where the exhibition remained on show, allowing audiences to explore the space in full. Every element — fashion, graffiti, protest, and installation — was designed to exist together, creating a living, interconnected world.
The murals I created in the Leadworks corridor served as the exhibition gateway, setting the tone for the space. Fluorescent and bold pigments shift under different lighting, echoing the flames, pinks, and blacks in the garments and tying the visual language across mediums. Visitors could move through the corridor and feel as though the outfits had leapt straight off the walls — a perfect introduction to the JEZE universe.
The exhibition featured a carefully curated selection of props sourced from the street, including spray-painted pink traffic cones, lit-up traffic bollards, hanging textile works and banners from protests, and a handmade fence scattered with photos of my graffiti work in the wild. These elements reinforced the DIY and subcultural roots of the project, blending street aesthetics with gallery presentation.
Central to the exhibition were the protest board installations, designed to showcase handmade signs in a stacked formation reminiscent of an actual demonstration. Mannequins were placed amongst the work to link fashion, artwork, and activism. Each element, from text on the signs to garments, murals, and street-sourced props, reinforced the interconnected nature of the project, highlighting how style, message, and resistance exist as one unified language.
At the heart of the event was the fashion show, set to a playlist spanning grime, hip hop, reggae, dub, jungle, punk, and vogue beats. Every track was chosen for its connection to resistance — from women’s and queer liberation, to Black and working-class struggles, to anti-capitalist and anti-fascist movements. Music acted as a unifier, reinforcing creativity as an act of resistance and celebrating the overlap of subcultures and communities. A special mention goes to Deck LaMano, whose downstairs experimental hip hop set captured the spirit of the evening.
This exhibition was both personal and political: a DIY, immersive, and unapologetic space for celebrating rebellion, creativity, and empowerment. By bringing years of practice into a single event and short public showing, the show invited audiences to step fully into the world of NO DIGNITY, where all elements — art, fashion, music, protest, and street interventions — coexist in dialogue, amplifying the themes of resistance and women’s empowerment that run through the project.
FASHION COLLECTION
The NO DIGNITY clothing collection marks a return to freedom in sewing after years of working under tight academic restrictions. JEZE creates in an experimental, instinctive way, using upcycled and repurposed materials, especially army surplus. Having been drawn to army surplus since her teenage years as a punk and skinhead, she reconnects with the raw, playful energy that first sparked her love of making.
JEZE reimagines the military uniform as a symbol of resistance, drawing from the ways subcultures and protest movements have historically subverted authority through style. Blending rough, raw edges with high-glamour embellishment, the collection pays homage to drag and showgirl aesthetics while finding beauty in imperfection and decay. Each garment bears traces of JEZE’s graffiti roots through hand-painted and spray-painted details. The result is a body of work that celebrates rebellion, DIY creativity, and sustainability—challenging fast fashion and encouraging others to see the potential in reinvention.
