Jess's PhD research investigates how the practice of 'traditional arts' (medieval manuscript painting, icon painting and tile-making) could be developed as a tool for exegesis of particular episodes concerning sanctified place in the Hebrew Bible. Her artworks create what she is calling ‘experiential-experimental visual exegesis’. They present the viewer with an embodied lens through which to view the text. They draw on two 'lineage of influences': historical-critical and rabbinic commentary on the biblical text, and Jewish visual receptions of the stories (late antique Jewish synagogue art; Spanish medieval Jewish illuminated manuscripts; the work of the Jewish Abstract Expressionists, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman).