In 2006 Semple's exhibition "Epiphany" at Martin Summers Fine Art in London questioned the role of religion in modern life in a series of in-your-face paintings that alluded to popular culture, graphic media, advertising and social issues. Later works In 2007 Semple exhibited "Fake Plastic Love", an exhibition of billboard scale paintings housed within a blacked out environment of East London's Truman Brewery. In 2009 he held his first New York solo exhibition "Everlasting Nothing Less" at Anna Kustera Gallery involving large scale paintings and sculpture which also toured London and Milan. Semple's "The Happy House" series of paintings built upon the themes explored in earlier collections of fears about his generation, as well as commentary on the artifice of media obsession, politics and disappointment. For the first time he touched on more personal narratives as well as current cultural and political issues. His self-portrait 'A Pounding Outside Poundland' captured the moment Semple was assaulted. He told Esquire "I feel I have been analysing popular culture from outside itself by using its own languages". The solo exhibition "It's Hard To Be A Saint In This City" in Hong Kong heavily featured text in and on sculptures, exploring poetry and song lyrics of adolescent dreaming and isolation. Solo exhibition "Suspend Disbelief" (2013) in London explored ideas of superstition and illusion. Semple created an immersive exploratory environment with film, paintings and sculpture throughout 15 rooms, where magic tricks were performed by holograms, childhood experiences revisited and he questioned the cycle of life and death within a projection dome where hundreds of flowers perpetually bloom in time lapse. "It's like life without any death because they never wilt." "Anxiety Generation" (2014) at Delahunty Gallery on Bruton Street was reviewed in Modern Painters by Jonathan R Jones who likened the series to John Carpenter's film "They Live" and referencing Heidegger and Derrida in context of the erasure of text used by Semple "words in his paintings ("too high, too far, too soon," "cool aid," and "Froot Loops") are frequently crossed out, suggesting their inability to convey meaning", and commends the achievement to cut through our cynicism and give images again the power to disturb with his use paint where horror images have been immortalised out of the faster moving social media image world that can see society numb to continual rolling images of war and disaster. "My Sonic Youth" (2015) held in Fabien Castanier