This dissonance, between horror and habit, emotional urgency and digital numbness runs through the heart of the project. ”The world is on fire, and we are the world… that’s what they’re observing,” she says. “So it’s this reaction to the fact that I know so many of us feel like we’re just these kind of helpless observers of so much tragedy.”

Her visual language, grounded in material history, but always looking forward, has led to commissions with major cultural institutions and brands, from a building-sized collage of Jay-Z for the Brooklyn Library to a street-facing campaign for Burberry featuring Marcus Rashford. This street-side accessibility to her calibre of work is often hard to come by, so when it appears unfiltered in public space, it carries a kind of intimacy and urgency that gallery walls could never contain. Jazz’s early training originating at London College of Fashion in menswear was where she encountered collage not as just a moodboarding tool, but as a full and complete medium of creative expression. “It’s as if the images themselves are like found objects or artifacts”, Jazz shares, “and then by combining them with other things, be that foliage or natural disasters, or whatever it is, you start to build up a different story”.

For this collaboration, the emotion is front and centre. “It’s a cathartic, slightly manic investigation into these events that haunt me,” she says. “I just like the idea that it might remind someone who’s seeing it that they are feeling things that someone else is feeling.”

You trained in menswear at the London College of Fashion. How did your background in fashion design lead you toward collage and stop-motion animation, and in what ways does that early training still influence how you build an image today?

Anytime you start making a mood board for any kind of design project, collage is where you start. It’s really common to have that as a sort of entry point into a project. We had a specific collage workshop day in my second year at LCF, and it felt slightly different. It wasn’t about mood boarding, it was more expressive. I still have some of those collages, and I think I was starting to work in a way that excited me, I really enjoyed it. But I didn’t really think much of it, because it just felt like part of my process. The collages became just completely separate from that. They were just ways to express myself, because fashion is actually not a creative place to work. I think I was really struggling with not really understanding the fashion industry, thinking that I would be working in a more creative way.

I was skint so I would just go to charity shops and just collect random books and just start making collages. I don’t even think I had an intention for them, but I was sharing them online because I think it was about world building at that point. They’re kind of intrinsically linked to the fashion journey – it’s still the same mentality as just producing ideas for concepts, basically. It kind of feels a little bit like a work in progress. But I think the way it relates is definitely just the fact that I’m interested in texture, form, colour, and I guess culture. I’m really interested in bringing together things that feel like they relate. It’s as if the images themselves are like found objects or artifacts, and then by combining them with other things, be that foliage or natural disasters, or whatever it is, you start to build up a different story.

Your upcoming BUILDHOLLYWOOD collaboration spans 13 billboards across London, telling a powerful visual story in four parts. Can you take us through the emotional arc of this series, from the burning eyes to the final scenes of protest and hope?

The first thing I thought of was these burning eyes, with these flames in the eyes, which is imagery I’ve used in an animation before. And in that previous animation, this woman has flames in her eyes because she’s watching a meteor crash into the earth in this sort of apocalyptic montage.

I started imagining it here because I was really aware of how much I’ve been observing the burning world, both metaphorically and literally burning on my phone. It slotted into focus when I made the connection to the fact that the billboards themselves almost look like a phone screen. Then it just really cemented this idea, this initial starting point, because it was like I’m responding also to the fact that these billboards are in the world, and these eyes are looking into the world through the portal of the billboard, and the burning world is reflected in their eyes. The world is on fire, and we are the world, we make up the world, and that’s what they’re observing. So it’s this sort of reaction to the fact that I know so many of us feel like we’re just these kind of helpless observers of so much tragedy.

There’s a deep emotional charge in this work; fires reflected in pupils, nature in revolt, silhouettes caught in chaos. How much of your practice is a form of catharsis or personal processing, especially when engaging with such heavy subject matter?

I think for this particular project, it’s fully a cathartic kind of slightly manic investigation into these events that haunt me. I think I always kind of tap into that in some way, but this feels much more visceral and more placed in the right now. Previously I think it’s been a little bit more ambiguous and a bit more like investigating my heritage or histories amongst more kind of dream-like concerns, but this was a little bit more specific. I just like the idea that it might remind someone who’s seeing it that they are feeling things that someone else is feeling.

The recent Steve McQueen exhibition at the Turner Contemporary called Resistance definitely had a big influence on me for this project. I had been wanting to do a collage of some kind inspired by protest essentially across eras and countries, so when Steve McQueen’s show opened, it really cemented that for me. It was really inspiring and informative to experience all these different protests across generations in the UK, and the history of protest in the UK and how much that is a sign of the resistance that people garner.

You’ve described your process as tactile, instinctive, and intuitive, a process of cutting, layering and composing. Why is that physicality important to you, and how does it shape the emotional and conceptual feel of your final pieces?

My grandad, known as Bageye, was cut out of every family photograph when my grandma finally kicked him out, and there’s this really haunting picture of my dad where he actually looks like he’s floating because the person holding him has been cut out. I don’t know if that’s some kind of subliminal thing that’s fed into my work, but that exists in my psyche somewhere. A friend of mine made the connection. I didn’t really think about it like that, but I think when you’re removing people and you’re cutting things up, there’s an emotional charge behind that.

You used the word instinctive – everything I do is just based purely on how it makes me feel when I look at it. I put two things together, and I wait for the emotion to kind of present itself, and then I know. Sometimes it will make me feel physically sick and I can’t look at it anymore and I know that’s not the right combination, rather there being any legitimate kind of rule.

This new series plays with the scale and framing of phone screens, invoking themes of surveillance, doomscrolling, and passive witnessing. How do you see media and technology shaping our emotional response to global crises, and how does your work push against that?

I guess we’re so in it, that it’s hard to imagine a way of experiencing everything without that intense technological connection. It goes through this portal of social media and the immediacy of it on our phones. I think the word passive is apt there. We’ve learned so much about ourselves over the last two years and what we will tolerate as a human race, right? Things that are normalised now we wouldn’t have ever imagined three years ago, you know?

I guess it used to be that we would watch it on the TV and it would be framed in a certain way, rather than just interjected between matcha lattes or other frivolous things. I do really struggle with that, and I also find that something to interrogate when it comes to social media and the news, it’s something we kind of just accept now, but I find social media to be something kind of insidious with a motive. It wants us to stay using it, so for something as serious as a genocide to be funnelled through a capitalist platform that is just looking to keep us hooked on watching, then that material becomes part of that machinery, and that’s really dehumanising. I think a lot of people recognise that, I’m definitely not alone in thinking that, but it’s really concerning, and it’s really depressing.

I would never know what the answer is, because having access to that information has been really important for movements against the wars and everything that’s been going on. I don’t know that the answer is to not continue to use that platform, but I think it’s something that we should be interrogating.

You’ve worked with major artists and brands, from Jay-Z to Burberry, Hermés and Gucci. What have those experiences taught you about your practice?

I think the Jay Z one was probably the wildest one. It’s taught me that there’s a lot more that I’m capable of than I would have imagined, to be honest. It’s really gratifying when you can quite clearly trace the things that you’ve learned from one project and see that they’re influencing the next one. I wouldn’t have decided to make a building scale mural of Jay Z (laughs), that’s not something that would have come up in my personal practice. But what was really nice about that project was that it was about investigating his career, his life and his influence. And there was no doubt that there was so much to explore within that, and so much beauty and inspiration. There’s only a few people who can really chart that level of cultural influence on the world when it comes to music. He means a lot to a lot of people

How does your personal background, including your family history, cultural influences, or lived experience, inform the lens through which you view the world, and the way you construct it in your work?

I think my beginnings started with quite a specific investigation into my own heritage and history and culture, and maybe it will continue to be without it being something I’m consciously thinking about. I think what comes to mind when you said that was this idea of storytelling, and trying to mark a moment in time, a history. I didn’t really want this body of work to feel like it was about me, in a way. I didn’t want it to feel like I was investigating myself, I wanted it to feel like a reflection of what I think it feels like at the moment, but you can’t escape that gaze really. I think if that’s what your identity is, if that’s what your foundation is, then I can’t really imagine it going another way, in a way. But I really did quite like the idea of tapping into this concept of historic art, almost. But not like a specific history, more just like responding to historic moments in a more abstract kind of way, indirectly.