"Vinicunca, Rainbow Mountain" Painting

Born in Lima, Peru, Gisella Stapleton is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores female interiority, cultural memory and belonging. Working across painting, mixed media, embroidery and muralism, she examines the relationship between our inner landscapes and the natural world, reimagining inherited visual languages through contemporary figuration.

The female figure lies at the centre of Stapleton’s practice, not as portraiture, but as a vessel for interior experience. Her figures inhabit moments of contemplation, transition and self-determination, while botanical forms, birds, seeds and other elements of the natural world operate as extensions of their emotional landscapes. Through these relationships, her work considers how identity is shaped by what we inherit, the environments we inhabit and the connections we form.

Drawing on her Peruvian and Latin American heritage, Stapleton brings together geometric abstraction, colour and references to Andean textile traditions. Acrylic painting is increasingly combined with hand embroidery, recycled jute and fragments of Aguayo textile, creating layered surfaces in which painting and textile practices coexist. Rather than reproducing traditional motifs, she fragments and reinterprets them, approaching cultural inheritance as something living: carried across places and generations and continually transformed through experience.

Since relocating to London in 2011, Stapleton has developed a parallel public art practice centred on place, cultural identity and collective experience. Her large-scale commissions include the Paddington mural at Southbank’s Sutton Walk for StudioCanal and Visit London, as well as public works for Elmbridge Council, the University of Roehampton, Latin Elephant and Southwark Council, among others.

In 2025, Stapleton was invited as Artist in Residence at Kew Gardens, creating murals, large-scale paintings and hand-painted ceramic works for the internationally celebrated Orchid Festival. Drawing on Peruvian biodiversity, traditional dance and ancestral pattern-making, the project brought together many of the concerns that continue to shape her studio and public practice. She has also contributed to The Big Egg Hunt London, commissioned by Elephant Family and exhibited on the Strand.
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Gisella Stapleton lives and works in London.