Artist : Phoebe Cummings
Title : Chrysanthemum
Medium : clay on paper
Dimensions : 42 x 30 cm


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Phoebe Cummings’ works predominantly using unfired clay to make poetic and performative sculptures and installations that emphasise materiality, fragility, time, creation, loss and decay. Her impressive interventions are often constructed directly on site, allowing an instinctive development of tensions between object and location. Cummings questions what we will carry forward into the future by producing intricate, hand made and exquisitely delicate sculptures based on ancient plants and primitive ritual, imbued with a sense of magic and mysticism. Drawing together elements of English Paganism as well as the aesthetic excess of Baroque and Rococo design, the resultant objects could be considered as dystopian ornaments of a future anthropology or fragile relics of an almost forgotten past.

Cummings is a British artist born in Walsall, England and currently resides in Stafford. She studied ceramics at Brighton University in 2002 before completing an MA in ceramics and glass at the Royal College of Art in 2005. She has undertaken a number of international artist residencies including a six month residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2010. In 2017 she won first place at the inaugural Woman’s Hour Craft Prize with work exhibited at the V&A Museum, before touring to venues around the UK. Cummings was selected as the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award in 2011 and awarded a ceramics fellowship at London’s Camden Arts Centre (2012–13). ‘Supernatural’ was her first solo exhibition at Anima-Mundi. In addition, Cummings’ work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including ‘60|40 Starting Point Series’ at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, ‘Formed Thoughts’ at Jerwood Space, London; and ‘Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design’ at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. In 2013, she had a solo show at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery in Honolulu and The Newlyn Art Gallery.