Gisella Stapleton

About

Gisella Stapleton is a Peruvian-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores female interiority, cultural memory and belonging. Across painting, hand embroidery, mixed media and muralism, she examines the relationship between our inner landscapes and the natural world, reimagining inherited visual languages through contemporary figuration.

Statement

My practice explores the inner landscapes of women and the ways in which our emotional lives, cultural memory and sense of belonging shape how we understand ourselves and relate to the world around us. I am interested in experiences of introspection, transformation, resilience and self-determination, and in giving visual form to states that often remain unseen. The female figure sits at the centre of this enquiry. Rather than portraying specific individuals, I use the body, gesture and gaze as vehicles for interior experience. My figures often inhabit moments of stillness or contemplation, where vulnerability and strength are allowed to coexist. Increasingly, I am also interested in the relationships between women — in intimacy, support and the ways we hold and shape one another. Nature operates as an extension of these interior landscapes. Plants, seeds, flowers, birds and organic forms move between the symbolic and the physical, creating a dialogue between what happens within us and the living world beyond the body. Growth, rootedness, movement and cycles of transformation recur throughout the work, not as fixed symbols, but as ways of thinking about human experience and our place within a wider ecology. Born in Peru and now based in London, I am also interested in the ways cultural memory travels with us. References to Latin American and Andean visual traditions enter my work through colour, geometry, pattern, textiles and processes of making. Rather than reproducing these traditions, I fragment and reinterpret them, exploring heritage as something living — carried across places and generations, transformed through experience and continually reconstructed in the present. This enquiry extends to the physical construction of the work. Alongside acrylic paint, I incorporate hand embroidery, recycled jute and fragments of Andean Aguayo textiles. Stitching, layering and assembling allow different histories and textures to inhabit the same surface, creating a dialogue between painting and textile practices, between the contemporary and the inherited. The visible presence of the hand is important to me: it introduces intimacy, time and care into the making of each work. Moving between figuration and abstraction, I am developing a visual language in which the female body, nature, geometry and textile traditions can intersect without belonging entirely to one realm. Through these relationships, my work considers how our inner lives are shaped by what we inherit, the environments we inhabit, the connections we form and the ways in which we continue to transform.

Commissions

I accept commissions for original figurative and mixed meddia paintings, as well as murals. Each commission is developed in dialogue with the collector or space while remaining rooted in my visual language and artistic practice.