Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King
Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King (b. 1998) is a London-based painter whose practice operates through a gestural and material language in which painting becomes a physical and cathartic act. Working across charcoal, oil, and distemper, her abstract-figurative forms emerge through movement, instinct, and bodily rhythm, where mark-making functions as a direct trace of physical and emotional states. Her work considers painting as a form of release — echoing how the body negotiates, absorbs, and sheds the pressures of contemporary life through rhythm, repetition, and intensity of gesture.
Recent exhibitions include Urban Dwellers at LVH at The Painting Rooms (London, 2025) and a duo presentation with Matt Carey-Williams at Matt Carey-Williams (London, 2025). She completed her MA in Fine Art (Painting) at the Slade School of Fine Art (2025), following her BA at the Glasgow School of Art, where she was recognised through awards including the Sarabande Foundation Emerging Artists Fund (2025) and the Richard Ford Award (2025).
When did you first feel pulled to make something? And did you have any idea then what it was really about?
I think I have always made things. When I was younger I would make paintings with my mum, or we would construct a cardboard house to be used as a den. There was always something being formed from my hands before it was formalised.
Where does a painting live before it actually exists?
Maybe an accumulation of conversations, both with others and yourself. And with other works, sounds, places. They materialise as a piece when those threads have bound together in some way to produce something that has to be conceptualised.
What does your studio look like right now? And what does that say about you?
Hung on my studio walls are multiple paintings that I am working on in relationship to each other. It probably says that I like to paint and to play with material; the floors are littered with pots of distemper and oil, alongside piano keys.
Is there anything in your process you couldn’t work without? A material, a gesture, a habit?
I like to begin a large work with a gesture that activates my whole body. And to have dark chocolate to hand at all times.
What’s something that genuinely changed you? A film, a record, a book, a place?
Fred Moten and Christina Sharpe’s writing disrupted and reformed my whole way of thinking and being. Then also *Who Is Sonny Rollins?* by Dick Fontaine, and jazz in general with every listen.
When was the last time something you made surprised you? And did you trust it?
Every painting I make. It’s scary and thrilling, and I think maybe it needs this to be successful.
If a total stranger to art walked into one of your shows, what would you want them to leave with?
A release, and something like the feeling of being bathed in a good song.
What are the things you’ve just always kept around? The ones you’d never throw out?
My old notebooks.