Rebecca’s work is based on careful observational drawing as a way of seeing, recording, investigating and analyzing. During her time at the Royal College of Art she worked mainly in watercolour, drawing bird skins at the Natural History Museum and ethnographic artefacts made from feathers at the British Museum. Her interest in feather artefacts stems from a year spent living in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (in 1982) and subsequently studying social anthropology at Cambridge University.
Rebecca is currently Artist in residence at the British Museum, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. She is part of a research group working on the relatively little-known Melanesian collections. The research for her drawings and paintings is mainly done at the museum ethnography stores in Shoreditch.
Rebecca’s work is about exploring the shared histories between the people that made these artefacts, the explorers, anthropologists and travelers that obtained them and the museum that now houses them. In storage the object is numbered, labeled, catalogued, photographed and measured; yet its aesthetic qualities can still be appreciated.
"There is a magic, routinely practiced by artists, that transforms the way we see our world. A shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde becomes a 'must see’ modern cultural totem worshipped by crowds that would in turn ignore objects belonging to a ‘primitive' religious past but retaining persistence in folk memory and superstition. It is therefore doubly ironic that Jewell’s art provides an access to this shared heritage by applying old fashioned technique to a contemporary art context and in doing so she produces beautiful, original work that shares with its subject matter an elusive and often unsettling undertow of meaning." Paul Bayley, Director, Florence Trust, 2009.