Gemma Cumming graduated in 2006 from Loughborough University (School of Art and Design) with a BA in Fine Art. She has since been in numerous exhibitions and sold work to public collections. Her work deals with notions of anticipation and tourism, utilising tourist imagery to create giant painted postcards with an ominous twist.

Centering around notions of failed perfection, her work primarily explores imagery that sells an expectation of a place, not it's reality. Creating tension by replacing the stereotypical blue skies with darker and/or more ominous ones, adding other incongruous objects and highlighting people passivity to their unusual environment the viewer is forced to look again at the scene.

She would love to say her focus is London and its tourist sites although she enjoys occasional distractions and any excuse to go take photos of anywhere. As such she has a large backlog of places and inspirations yet to paint. She has created place specific paintings for particular exhibitions outside of London including Windsor, Bracknell, Bath and Farnham.

She has recently completed a number of ambitious projects including a large scale multi canvas work on London, painting a life size fibreglass adolescent elephant for summer 2010's Elephant Parade London (raising funds for 'The Elephant Family' a charity dedicated to the Asian Elephant) and an installation in the ReOrsa Project Space that explores further how scale impacts on her works. She also continues to create drawings and digital works on the same themes.

Click here to read her statement in full

In 2006 she wrote her University Dissertation on the subject of postcards.
Specifically on the 'Relationships between text and image in western landscape postcards and the formation of public perception of places.'

Click here to download a pdf of the document (2.9 MB)

Gemma can be contacted on gemma@gemmacumming.com