ARTIST STATEMENT
Natasha Lumley is a figurative London-based painter who seeks to make the invisibility of deafness visible in painterly form. Working in oil, painted from photographs she stages herself, she crops and zooms into figures to foreground the communicative potential of body language and British Sign Language (BSL) in faces, gestures and visual cues. She uses a strong, vibrant palette to create visual immediacy.
Characters in caps and long coats, evoking detectives or spies, become visual metaphors for the deaf experience of guessing, piecing together missed words and context. She reclaims BSL and signing, challenging hearing assumptions and the suppression of bodily expression reinforced by the 1880 Milan Conference, that banned sign language in deaf education. Gestures and facial expressions that shaped a language once suppressed and ignored are brought into the light.
Natasha Lumley (b. 1998)
Education
2025-2026 MA Fine Art, City and Guilds of London Art School, London
2023-2024 Post Diploma in Figurative Painting, Heatherleys School of Fine Art, London
2021-2023 Portraiture Diploma, Heatherleys School of Fine Art, London
2017-2020 BA (Hons) Art History & Visual Culture, University of Exeter
Exhibitions
2026 MA Degree Show, City and Guilds of London Art School, London
2026 30 by 30 Group Exhibition, Two Plus Two ACME Studios
2026 Interrogating Identities, City Lit Gallery
2026 MA Interim Show, City and Guilds of London Art School, London
2025 London’s Dreaming, Art in the City 2025 Exhibition, Painters’ Hall, London
2025 Deaf Art Exhibition, Royal Association for Deaf people London office
2025 Edinburgh Deaf Festival, Edinburgh
2024 Post Diploma Graduates Exhibition, Heatherleys School of Fine Art, London
2023 Wimbledon Art Fair, London
2023 Society of Women artists 162nd Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London
2023 Heatherleys School of Art Diploma Show, London
Awards
2023 World End Studios prize, London
2022 Marianne Braganza Prize, Heatherleys, London
Bursary
2023-24 Painters-Stainers Scholarship