YouTube content creator Jess Bell isn’t the sort of person who buys art on a whim. In fact, she needs to have an emotional connection with an item before she’ll bring it into her home. Her favourite artwork, though, was bought in a hurry and without a lot of thought. It was an out-of-character move that has paid off in more ways than one. She tells the story to Matt Lawrey.
Jess Bell’s favourite artwork, a hand-dyed and hand-stitched Japanese curtain, was bought on impulse.
She and her partner Scott Brown were in Japan last year when she spotted the traditional curtain, known as a noren, at an artisans’ fair in the city of Nagahama.
Jess, a professional YouTube producer, wasn’t planning on buying anything and was on a tour at the time.
“We passed the stand and we weren’t coming back, and I just saw it hanging there. I really umm-ed and ahh-ed… Normally I obsess over every purchase but because I couldn’t think about it, I just had to impulse buy it and, honestly, I’m so glad I did. It’s like it was made for our home,” she said.
“We thought originally we’d hang it on a big wall in our living room but it’s supposed to hang over a door and, because we’re in the middle of a renovation, the place can be a bit of a mess and, by putting up the noren over the doorway, it obscures some of the mess.”
The curtain cost $250 and Jess Ioves the fact it’s not just a piece of art that hangs on the wall.
“I really like that you have to look through it. I like that you have to walk through it. It’s interactive and it’s functional. When you have a cross breeze coming through the house, it just gently sways and it’s so peaceful. It’s my favourite thing.”
Jess didn’t get time to talk to the artist about the subject of the work but likes to think it’s of a sun or a comet.
“It’s not static to me. It looks like it’s left a blaze behind it, and the fact that you interact with it, and the wind catches it, adds to the movement.”
Jess also marvels at how well it goes in their 1960s home.
“What’s so funny about it is that I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I bought it, I just liked it. Then, when we came home, I realised ‘Oh gosh, it looks quite sixties, it suits the colour palette and, functionally, we have the perfect place for it’.”
The way it connects them to their time in Japan is also important.
“It was the first time we’d left New Zealand in eight years. We went over there to make films for our channel, to do something different. It was a big deal for us, and I really wanted something to remind me of that time in the house that I looked at all the time.”
Jess says she has always been someone who puts “a lot of meaning” into everything she owns.
“I really need to have quite an emotional connection with something that I bring into the house, or it needs to remind me of something. I guess I’m quite romantic, I like to believe that art will find me. I can’t just pick something because maybe I think it looks cool. It has to have a deeper meaning.”
Auckland-born and bred, Jess went to Epsom Girls Grammar after which she spent a year as an exchange student in Germany. After giving university a go and deciding it wasn’t for her, Jess moved to Berlin for a year. During that stint in Europe, she met Scott, who was living in Scotland, through a mutual friend.
“The first nine months of our relationship was long distance between Berlin and Scotland. We met up in Poland a lot because it was really cheap,” Jess said.
Upon returning to Auckland, Jess got a temp job at Carter Holt Harvey, which led to her becoming the company’s marketing coordinator. After couple of years in that role, she briefly worked at Auckland Memorial Museum before deciding to go full time with Scott on their YouTube channel. Scott Brown Carpentry has over 415,000 subscribers and since 2017 has produced over 530 videos. The couple create informative and entertaining videos covering a huge range of building and building-related topics. Their most popular video, which is on how to build a plywood floating shelf, has been watched over two million times.
The couple decided to make the move from Auckland to Nelson during lockdown. At the time they were living in a one-bedroom apartment and running Scott’s building company out of a container. When the 43 square metre apartment they were renting was sold for almost $700,000 they realised that if they wanted their own place they had to get out of Auckland. The couple bought a “massive” map of New Zealand and started considering their options. They also set themselves the task of separately writing lists of the places they would most like to live.
“The lists were completely different except we both had Nelson as number one,” Jess said.
What followed were some exploratory trips around the country but it soon became clear that their initial hunches about Nelson were right. The next thing they knew they were buying their house, sight unseen. It’s a move that has turned out to be a good one. Jess and Scott love their home, their channel is continuing to be a success and they’ve made some great friends.
“Nelson is really special to us,” Jess said.
