An interdisciplinary scholar, Gemma has worked for over two decades on the entangled histories of art, literature and medicine in early 20th-century Europe, and on what she has termed Austria's 'clinical modernism'. Specialising in the formation of modernist, medicalised identities in Vienna circa 1900, she has published and curated widely in a field her work served in part to establish, including critically-acclaimed exhibitions for the Wellcome Collection, the Wien Museum, the National Gallery London, the Leopold Museum, and the Freud Museum London.
Gemma’s curating and writing projects are deeply archival, bringing marginalised lives and ‘minor’ works, objects and sources to discussions and displays of modernism, drawing attention to this history’s classed, sexed and gendered exclusions. Unpublished, frequently hand-written historical correspondence comprises much of the material she engages with; encounters with these papers stimulate her voice-attuned, increasingly polyphonic writing and other modes of 'speaking with' her historical subjects.
Current and recent projects include: a collaboration with art historian Dr Alice Butler on practices of care in cross-historical love letter writing to and ‘from’ art history’s ‘sick women’; an epistolary biography of Bessie Bruce, a London-born, chronically-ill music hall artiste working in Vienna around 1900; a collaboration with musician and music-producer The Dengie Hundred on an album of field recording, spoken word and song, which follows clues left in lovesick archive papers across Europe to go in search of Bruce through the health resorts she wrote from.
Working from the Royal College of Art London, where Gemma supports postgraduates with the development of creative research methods, her work extends to the contributions of practice-based research to feminist histories of art that engage with health and care, as well as to the emerging field of the critical medical humanities. She established the CARE postgraduate group in the College's School of Arts & Humanities in 2019 to consider how creative research methods might attend to the care of bodies across time, and co-edited its two anthologies of 2021 and 2022. She co-founded the School's Health & Care Research Cluster for staff.