About Gemma Lessinger Art

From clothing to coastlines, I create richly textured seascapes inspired by the coastlines that stay with us long after we've left them.

Based in Cornwall, my work explores the connection between place, memory and material. Every painting begins with a shoreline that has shaped someone's life - whether it's a beach walked every morning, the view from a family holiday, or the stretch of coast where life's biggest moments unfolded.

Working with layers of paint, textiles and found materials, I build sculptural surfaces that echo the movement and rhythm of the ocean itself. Fabrics become more than texture; they carry stories, history and a quiet sense of familiarity that deepens each piece.

Following a twenty-year career in fashion and design, my understanding of textiles naturally found its way into my artistic practice. Today I combine those materials with contemporary painting to create works that invite people to reconnect with places they love most.

The ocean remains my anchor. It is a place of containment and release. Of tension and tranquillity. While my work often evokes stillness, it carries an undercurrent of transformation - materials once associated with excess becoming objects of permanence and reflection.

I don't begin with a sketchbook. I begin with a camera.

Photography has always been central to the way I experience the coastline. Long before I painted professionally, I was fascinated by composition, perspective and the way an image could capture a feeling as much as a place. Today, I spend countless hours exploring the shoreline on foot and from the air, using drone photography to reveal the patterns, movement and rhythm of the coastline from a perspective few people ever experience. These moments become the foundation of my paintings, before layers of paint, textiles and natural materials transform them into tactile landscapes that invite others to reconnect with the places they love.

Many of my commissions incorporate personal materials: fragments of wedding dresses, childhood garments, rope from a favourite cove. These pieces move beyond depiction; they become vessels for lived experience, where structure, memory and movement meet.

Alongside my studio practice, I lead creative experiences rooted in the same belief - that making with our hands reconnects us to presence. Whether through a painting or a shared session, my work invites a slower kind of looking. A closer kind of feeling.

I am interested in what we choose to preserve. What we discard. And how material - like the tide - can always be reimagined.