About Jemma

30 year-old Jemma Davies was born and brought up in Kenya. She attended school in Nairobi and moved on to formal training in the UK. Soon drawn back to her roots, she returned home to pursue a professional career in painting.

Over the past decade she has had several successful exhibitions, making a name for herself in and around Nairobi.

Her earlier work concentrated predominantly on Kenya’s world-renown wildlife and landscapes. More recently, however, her fly-on-the-wall focus has shifted towards her country’s celebrated diversity of peoples, cultures and tribes.

“I look for the gaps between the stereotype and the exotic – between tradition and progress – in order to single out the humdrum magnificence of day-to-day survival in Kenya. I love to interact with my subjects, and i am fascinated by individual flair and social adaptability. My work focuses on universal human intimacies.

I’m proud to have been born Kenyan, and I’m constantly inspired, impressed, distressed, amused and bemused by the optimism, humour and pathos of tordinary people forging their lives against Kenya’s exotic back-drop”.