"My paintings and drawings focus on the landscapes around me and found objects I have collected over the years. The objects, whether natural or man-made, tend to be slight and often disgarded fragments but, whether I’ve had them one day or 40 years, they take on a significance for me and often recur in various forms throughout my work, creating a sense of my own history the more I use them.

My current series - The Pebble Beds - was sparked into life by moving between two places (East Devon and Gloucestershire) and trying to find a way of settling myself. Using a combination of treasured mementos and random finds from the beach with influences of local landscape and colour, I explore how different past and present worlds mingle and blur in the mind. These objects, de-contexualised within the artworks, become part talisman, part symbol, part touchstone, and are woven together to create mysterious, curious stories. Through these objects I also explore the landscape, the objects sometimes mimicking standing stones, twisting rivers, or mountainous forms. When looking at ancient artefacts, such as shards of pottery, humans tend to imagine the world, thoughts and feelings of the people connected to them, creating stories and links that may have very little to do with fact. I lean into this in my work, by putting the objects that I find on a pedestal, saying that even the most unassuming item could be worthy of close attention, and then exploring the threads that connect them to each other, to myself, and to the world."

​

Subsequent to her studies at Goldsmith’s University (BA Fine Art), Kester received a Post Graduate Printmaking Diploma from Central St Martins and has recently completed an MA in Drawing for Fine Art Practice from Oxford Brookes University.  She was born in the USA, lived in London, Caracas, Andalucia and Los Angeles before settling in Stroud where she now lives permenently.