About Jacqueline

My name is Jacqueline Hess.

I come from the high desert mountains of Southwest Colorado, where the wind moves through piñon pines and old ranch trucks fade slowly into the earth. It’s a landscape that teaches resilience — and beauty — all at once.

I have always been driven by a vivid hunger for life and adventure. I travel to mountain summits and ocean depths, chasing perspective. In between expeditions, I wander through forgotten places — junkyards, back fields, abandoned machinery — searching for what others have discarded. Where some see rust, I see history. Where others see waste, I see form, texture, possibility. I frame the quiet elegance of a weathered pickup left standing in a field. I turn relic into reverence.

Before I was an artist, I was an engineer. I earned my degree in mechanical engineering because I needed to know how things worked — and why. I took apart engines to understand their language. I studied systems, structure, and energy. For fifteen years I worked in sustainability and energy efficiency, devoted to improving the built environment and protecting the natural one.

That same impulse lives in my art.

Metal, especially reclaimed metal, carries memory. It has endured weather, pressure, use, neglect. When I cut, weld, patina, and layer steel, copper, and salvaged elements, I am not erasing their past — I am elevating it. My work is a conversation between precision and wildness. Engineering meets instinct. Structure meets story.

I am most at home in the garage, sparks flying, testing new ways to build something enduring from something forgotten. Every piece I create carries the spirit of the mountains that raised me and the adventures that continue to shape me.

My work is for those who understand that beauty is not manufactured — it is discovered. For those who believe that materials deserve a second life. For those who want art with backbone, history, and soul.

This is not just metal.

It is movement.
It is memory.
It is transformation.

And it is made to last.