Lily Kemp

Lives and works in London, UK

With an underlying interest in exploring narratives touching on the fluidity of gender and identities; Lily Kemp’s paintings explore escapism, storytelling, the act of dressing up and playing out imagined roles. Drawing from a range of visual references and written sources, through the process of collage she interweaves figures and images from popular culture alongside found images of landscapes and her own personal photographs. Looking in part at the relationships between popular culture, gender norms and our sense of self. More specifically at our relationship with fashion, how the way we choose to present ourselves can be considered an extension of ourselves and a way of exploring our identities outside of socially constructed binary categorisations. The sense of scale in Lily’s paintings is often distorted and exaggerated with an interchangeable indistinct relationship between her figures and the space surrounding them, her landscapes seeming to breathe a life of their own. Scenes are often hyper idealised and fantastical; her figures living within these imagined worlds and dream-like realities which are both familiar, yet also border on the performative and theatrical.