Extraordinary Portraits

Jules leads a small but dedicated team at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, caring for patients in the final weeks, days and hours of their lives. She's made it her life's mission to make people's last days as pleasant as possible, arranging everything from last-minute marriages to taste-for-pleasure sessions.

Outside of work she runs ‘grief cafes' for staff, where she helps them come to terms with their own bereavements.

Jules has been matched with Belinda, a nomadic painter currently living in Devon. Born in Mombasa, she grew up in Spain, trained in London and has lived and worked in New York, France and Pakistan. This melting pot of influences and cultures has informed and inspired her singular magical realism style of painting.

Belinda credits the experience of always being the outsider in a new place with helping her to develop a unique perspective, and her refusal to be tied to reality gives her paintings a dreamlike quality. How will she go about depicting someone whose working life is spent on threshold between life and death?