Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King paints with her whole body. Working across oil, distemper, and charcoal, her abstract-figurative paintings carry the trace of physical and emotional states, where rhythm and repetition do the work of getting something out. Born in 1998 and based in London, she completed her MA in Fine Art (Painting) at the Slade in 2025, where she was recognised by the Sarabande Foundation Emerging Artists Fund and the Richard Ford Award.

Her studio has piano keys on the floor. The references she names, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe, a Dick Fontaine documentary about Sonny Rollins, jazz on every listen, sit underneath the practice like a soundtrack you do not quite hear but feel in the timing of things. When asked what she wants a viewer to leave with, she says she wants them to feel “bathed in a good song.” When asked what scares her, she says: every painting she makes.

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.