Dismorr participated in almost all of the avant-garde groups active in London between 1912 and 1937 and was one of the few English painters of the 1930s to work in a completely abstract manner.

[1] Her mother suffered from extended periods of ill health but her father's income meant the family were free of financial worries and Jessica was able to travel extensively in Europe.

[2] Dismorr attended the Slade School of Art from 1902 to 1903, before training under Max Bohm at Etaples in 1904, and at the Académie de La Palette in Paris, between 1910 and 1913, where she studied under Jean Metzinger and was in the circle around the Scottish Colourist, John Duncan Fergusson.

[2] She shared the group's depiction of the dynamics of the machine and their desire to challenge the public's conservative views on art but little of her work from this period survives.

[5] William Roberts's painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915,[11] from 1961–62, shows the seven males dominating the foreground and the two women behind with Dismorr in the doorway being the furthest away.

[1][6] Dismorr and Wyndham Lewis fell out in 1925 when she refused to purchase some drawings from him when he was short of money but they appeared to have resumed a cordial friendship in 1928 when she did lend him some funds.

[3] Robin Ody, a close friend and the executor of Dismorr's will (in which all the beneficiaries were women), summed her up as "the Edwardian phenomenon of the new woman".

Lechmere had provided all the funds to pay for the Rebel Art Centre, where the Vorticists first met in 1914—a fact which Lewis had to admit to Christopher Nevinson who had not wanted "any of these damned women" in the group.

During World War I Dismorr served as a nurse in France and then as a bilingual field officer with the American Friends Service Committee.

[1] After the war Dismorr was at the centre of the London avant-garde world, acquainted with both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, with her poems and illustrations being published in various publications.

In 1924 Dismorr began a series of water colour paintings of music hall performers, a popular subject at the time.

[1] The exhibition included a series of water colours of landscapes painted in France, Italy, Spain, Scotland and England.

[2] A joint exhibition of works by Dismorr and Giles was held in 2000 at the Fine Art Society in London, with a catalogue written by Quentin Stevenson.