BIO

Seán Cummins graduated from Manchester Polytechnic with a BA(Hons) Fine Art in 1981 and from Goldsmiths MA Fine Art, in 2000. Between 1993 and 1998 Cummins was a Co-Director of the Gasworks Gallery in London where he was a founding artist. Seán has exhibited across the UK and internationally. He has exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery, London and placed his work in reputable collections.  Recently he had a solo exhibition at the Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London. Previous projects have been shown in USA, Austria, Hungary, Poland, South Korea and South Africa. He has interacted with the wider field of contemporary art practice by curating exhibitions (particularly at the Gasworks, London, UK and One Thoresby, Nottingham), organising conversations, studio visits and artist talks. Seán has attended artist workshops and residencies such as Abbey Fellow at The British School at Rome, Italy, British Council Scholar at Thupelo, Capetown, South Africa, Studio fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, USA and at the Triangle Artist workshop, New York where Clement Greenberg called his drawing “doo-hickey!”.

Statement

It begins with walking.

My work portrays a landscape that I carry within me. Exploring the fields near where I live, I take photographs that I transcribe and make into paintings that evoke these sites as places of renewal. Using colour and shape to transcribe the light that I experience, I have a methodology and a body of work that will benefit from reflection within a different context. To place myself into the landscape will force a productive pressure on my methodology. This unfamiliar strangeness will produce new and unforeseen paths for future work.

Modernism, Science Fiction and Vegetal Being inform my work. Considering rocks and earth as sites of death and re-birth, using these to make large immersive paintings. The project is inspired by Joanna Russ’s Sci-Fi novella, ‘We who are about to...’, in which the narrator considers her own mortality in relation to the rocky soil beneath her body. The author compares the scene with Fra Angelico crouching on his knees to paint images of rocks. These paintings focus on an intimate moment of renewal. Playing with the temperature of hue and transcribing further using negative shapes, I transform the image with painterly strategies whereby flatness, shape and colour are prioritised. The aim is to give space and time for renewal, for a new life through a subversive representation that emphasises slowness, intimacy and devotion.