Jessica Knight

Jessica’s life changed within 24 hrs during a trip to Jamaica somewhere around 2015. She was born and raised in ‘uptown’ Kingston, but moved to England aged nine, thereafter only returning home during school holidays. On one visit, in her twenties, she went to Kingston Dub Club during Reggae Month, and felt the words of Bob Marley expand her vision of what was possible through music. She attended her first Kundalini Yoga Class the next day, and had a spiritual awakening that she still can’t really explain, except to say that the whole experience made it difficult for her to return to her life in the UK. She eventually returned to her homeland and was immersed in the roots music scene. This showed her how little she knew of Jamaican history. She seeks to remedy this ignorance now by writing about conscious music. Writing is how she makes sense of the senseless, which is what she admires in the conscious lyrics of Roots reggae singers who do the same.

Despite her struggles to write a proper academic essay, Jessica learned many other useful things during her formal schooling. She mostly used this period to develop her love of dressmaking. After a work stint as an assistant producer for the television production company, Big Heart Media, Jessica went to Sussex University to study English Literature. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea was one of her favourite novels written by a Caribbean author. The Post-Colonial Literature course was her first true exposure to her own ‘browning’ heritage, and she expanded on this with electives in the African American Civil Rights Movement and South Africa’s history of apartheid. Dressmaking occurred in response to this schooling. She learned about sweatshop workers hired in clothes manufacturing and wanted to be independent of that system. Finally, Jessica graduated with a deepened understanding of how frustrating it is to be aware of existing social issues without having the means to resolve them.

Believing that art is the best way to spread messages of peace and unity, and that academia was not for her, Jessica undertook an MA in fine art at City & Guilds of London Art School. Here she produced sculpture, trying to make sense of contemporary versions of human and environmental exploitation that she was increasingly aware of. In her post-academic years she put her sewing skills to use, earning a living as a costume designer and maker for theatres in London. Jessica kept noodling away at writing, publishing work with Pree Lit and Skin Deep Magazine. 

Jessica has experienced the power of conscious music to heal and transform, through both Jamaican and Kundalini genres. It is an honour to continue to deepen her knowledge by meeting, interviewing and working with music artists.