Gemma Cumming

Born 1983 in Reading Gemma Cumming has been an amateur artist since she first picked up a crayon and a Professional since 2006.

Inspired by postcards, travel posters and all imagery related to tourism and the sale of a place, Gemma has created since 2005 giant painted postcards, taking beautiful sunny images of places around the globe and exchanging the blue skies with ominous, stormy or unusual skies. She also adds other objects into the works that do not belong contradicting that streotypical message created by postcards. Recently she has also started a series of ink drawings and digital prints on the same theme.

Artists Statement

My work centres around notions of failed perfection, utilising postcards to explore primarily imagery that sells places; which in reality dont fulfil our expectations. It is this idea of the perfect holiday that Im interested in, both from advertising and the way people are persuaded to visit places and through my own personal memories of childhood holidays in Britain. I looked at the Art of Travel by Alain de Botton (2002) and was very interested by his notions of anticipation. He believes that the images that we are presented with persuade us to go on holiday, but that no place ...