My access sheet is public as I believe it is important for
disabled artists to recognise their strengths and feel
empowered in communicating these to collaborative partners
and institutions.
Please feel free to use this as a template for your own
access sheet if you wish.
Jae Lily (they/she) is a visual and multidisciplinary artist based in Manchester, UK. They hold a particular interest in illustration, visual communication and storytelling, interactive works, and abstract digital art that enmeshes the physical with the virtual.
Holding a BA (Hons) in Fashion Art Direction from Manchester School of Art/Manchester Fashion Institute, their practice is playful, fluid, and experimental: they explore the relationship between physical and digital environments, memories and rituals, folklore, and identity formation. They work across static visual design, moving image, projection, installation, and digital media, and investigate how online spaces reshape communication, behaviour, and perceptions of self.
They are strongly influenced by early internet cultures - their adolescence was spent exploring unfamiliar corners of the internet, and they believe that the digital age has influenced our childhoods in more ways than initially thought, accounting for things that we are exposed to, information from across the world not ordinarily made available to a child, and forming virtual identities for senses of belonging in online communities. Digital archives, speculative ecosystems, fantasy imagery and nostalgic yet unfamiliar emotions settled deep in our memories are themes they enjoy picking apart, limb from virtual limb, considering the internet as an emotional landscape and archaeological site for relics of a time before daily internet usage. Areas where fragments of identity and nostalgia remain preserved within obsolete platforms, abandoned profiles, and outdated code; traces of evolving selves and cultures preserved through archived screenshots, anonymous interactions, and mundane digital behaviours, suspended in cyberspace.
Their recent work focuses on translating organic forms, mythological references, and natural behaviours into synthetic digital environments, creating surreal ecologies populated by fantasy-like objects and hybrid digital entities. Drawing inspiration from ideas surrounding folklore and worldbuilding, they explore how contemporary digital spaces generate their own myths, rituals, symbols, and creatures through collective behaviours and online storytelling.
Central to their practice is an ongoing pursuit of archiving, particularly the preservation of personal histories, communities, and evolving forms of language and communication across both physical and digital spaces. They are interested in how everyday acts of communication function as forms of contemporary folklore, carrying emotional and cultural memory across generations and platforms. Through preservation and speculative reconstruction of ideas, their work reflects on what is lost, transformed, created, or immortalised when human experience becomes mediated through technology, and blurring the boundaries between tangible and virtual, questioning how human experiences and identities are constructed, curated, and calcified into the digital ether.
Throughout their work, there is a strong interest in liminality and nostalgia: the unstable space between physical and virtual existence, memory and simulation, permanence and disappearance. Using surreal visuals, humour, and playfulness, underpinned by lived experience of neurodiversity, mental health issues, and the turbulence of recovery, they reframe overlooked fragments of daily life as strange encounters or whimsical objects, hoping to evoke strong appreciation for life as it is, and desire for lives as they could be.
Jae is the co-founder and creative director for youmatter, an arts & events collective founded on the concept of immersion, hosting a series of exhibitive dance nights platforming local creatives and inviting community with interactivity weaved into the foundations of the events.