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 and private collections. Centering around notions of failed perfection, anticipation and tourism, her work primarily explores imagery that sells an expectation of a place, not it's reality.

Through various media she subverts this notion. Originally working in painting, she creates giant painted postcards with an ominous twist. Replacing the stereotypical blue skies with darker and/or more ominous ones while retaining the brightly lit foreground, adding other incongruous objects and by highlighting people passivity to their unusual environment she forces the viewer to look again and again at the scene. She also creates drawings, prints and other works that explore the same themes and concerns.

Her works have an element of site specifity as she prefers to create works for a location that explores that place. She enjoys travelling whenever she can, to gain inspiration, photographs and new postcards. As such she has a large backlog of places yet to paint. She has created place specific paintings for particular exhibitions throughout the country including London, Windsor and Bath among others.

She has recently completed a number of ambitious projects including a large scale multi canvas work on London, she painted a life size fibreglass adolescent elephant for summer 2010's Elephant Parade London and a life size orang-utan for summer 2011's Jungle City Edinburgh (both raising funds for 'The Elephant Family' a charity dedicated to the Asian Elephant). Check out News (link on left) for recent developments.

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

And on Twitter and Facebook (click below)