Gemma Lippman

My art practice is driven by a desire to explore states of memory, perception, and emotional resonance. Through primarily painting and sculpture, installation, and mixed media, I am interested in how material space can evoke feelings that resist articulation through words. My work centers around the body as a site where the boundary between interior and exterior collapses, where something recognizable suddenly turns strange. 

My process is intuitive rather than linear: I often begin with dreamlike or nonsensical imagery, pulling from subconscious experiences or disconnected visual fragments. Through photographic collage, distorting and fragmenting references through editing software, I allow the work to mutate as it is created without following a strict composition. I view this act of making as a fluid dialogue between myself and the material. For me, the process of artmaking is an experience of slowly molding and shaping ideas to create a finished work. Constructing a piece becomes a process of sculpting each element until it reaches a final form.

My primary (and beloved) medium is oil paint––typically applied on stretched canvas, but occasionally with experimentation on other surfaces. To create ambiguity and tension between the interior and exterior of the body, composition and color work together intuitively. Rather than matching anatomical reality, I use color freely to further abstract the perception of a subject, creating a friction I want the viewer to inhabit.

This tension is central in my work, Untitled Mouth Piece, in which the known structure of the throat is enlarged past normal expectation until the mouth becomes less an opening and more a location, a place the viewer can enter rather than observe. By scaling the interior past the point of anatomical familiarity and filling it with bright color and celestial-like form, the body itself becomes a threshold the viewer is invited to enter.