Jess Allen (b. 1966, Dorset, United Kingdom) is a contemporary British artist based in Cornwall. She studied at Camberwell College of Arts and Falmouth School of Art. Her practice is centered around domestic objects and locating the sublime in the seemingly mundane. She explores the gulf between our exterior façades and inner worlds, allowing us to glimpse the varying degrees of chaos and order that may lie behind doors. Within the world of painting, Jess Allen’s works explore themes of absence, presence, emptiness, memory, and time. Objects stand in as symbols of individuals kept out of view: a discarded book becomes a direct reference to its absent reader. Scenes of domestic space, populated by quotidian objects yet uninhabited by visible figures, become psychologically charged windows that leave the viewer searching for human presence.