Jemima Murphy: Where Emotion Meets Momentum
Stepping into Jemima Murphy’s studio in London is like entering a colour factory. Canvases burst with colour. Drips cascade down walls and floor. For Murphy—born in 1992, a MA graduate from City & Guilds of London Art School—painting isn’t merely a process; it’s performance.
“Erratic and impatient—it’s how I work,” she says, her voice reflecting the same intensity as the swirls of purple and emerald around her. It’s spontaneity personified. “It’s who I am as a person. It feeds into my work. It’s like a live reaction… if I pause, it’s just me in my head, and I can’t do it.”
Jemima Murphy: Impulse Is Her Medium
Her practice flirts with urgency. She often jumps between canvases mid-flow—a form of creative momentum that mirrors her recent marriage (“I just got married in February, it was a quick engagement… kind of like how I work”). This fast pace reveals itself in layers of paint born from material mistakes turned deliberate decisions. “A lot of my work comes out of material mistakes… part of the process is about speed. It can stay in a certain phase for a while, and I don’t know what’s wrong until I come back to fix and finish it.”
Each painting, she says, becomes her favourite in its time—until the next piece demands her full attention. Yet she knows when to step back: “I have to get emotional detachment and space to know when and how to finish.” Time away grants clarity, helping transform crescendos of colour into resolved compositions.
Memory and Imagination
Jemima begins new work often by doodling on old canvases to purge built-up momentum. This ritualistic clearing of energy primes her both mentally and materially. Then comes the canvas—the blank stage—and the real show begins.
Her work is rooted in memory and place. As a child, she spent summers in the New Forest, traipsing through the woodland around a lake that remains central to her imagination. That scene—Rousseau-like in its lush layering—continues to inform her paintings’ emotional topography. Her mature work has shifted from hidden figuration to visually stunning abstraction: floral cascades that drip like waterfalls, inviting viewers into otherworldly realms.
Colour as Confession
For Jemima, colour is not just aesthetic—it’s autobiographical. She speaks of deep dives into tones that evoke Thailand, Kenya, and underwater realms—greens that feel like warmth, blues like depth. “Every time I feel I’ve run a colour into the ground, I find a way to bring it back,” she admits. “My emotions are reflected in the colours I use… sometimes it’s memory or a place too. I’ll try and relive a memory or an emotion for the sake of a painting.”
Music forms the soundtrack to this emotional excavation. Sometimes it’s country lyrics; other times, a Broadway musical plays from start to finish. “It depends on my mood,” she says. “I’ll always pick music or a genre that will inform the work. It depends on my mood, and it definitely feeds into the work. I’ll always pick something that informs what I’m making. The feeling of it goes into the painting.”
For Jemima Murphy, Canvas is a Stage
Jemima’s early training in stage acting infuses her studio presence with performance energy. Like an actor stepping onto a stage, she approaches the blank canvas with boldness. “It’s exciting to see a blank new canvas. I’m quite brave… it’s like going on stage,” she says. This performative stance—paired with her impulsive, erratic drive—gives her work a kinetic vitality, as if captured mid-dance.
An Ongoing Quest
Jemima’s paintings shift between literal recollection and felt emotion, each canvas a snapshot of lived experience filtered through instinct.
As she brushes fluorescent cyan or dripping rose across linen, you realise that she isn’t just painting—she’s performing, remembering, feeling. And what follows is something raw, immediate, and emotionally charged.
Jemima Murphy paints fast, but she paints deeply. Her work is less about capturing a moment and more about becoming it—riding the wave of whatever energy the day, the memory, the colour, or the music brings. In her studio, nothing is still. Everything is in motion.
See her next at Armory Show in New York, this September.
