CUT
Phoebe Cummings
February 8, 2020 - July 10, 2021
About the Exhibition
UK-based artist Phoebe Cummings has a ceramic practice that centers on the temporal aspects of the medium. Cummings creates ephemeral sculptures and environments from raw clay where the material enacts its own slow performance. At A-B Projects, her work cuts between material and trace, time and space, the tangible present and an evocation of the past.
In 2018 Cummings exhibited ‘A Ripening Surveillance,’ at The Tetley, Leeds (UK). This large-scale but temporary installation is now restaged and extended at A-B Projects. Cummings divides the gallery in half: on one side she builds a reading room with the same humid atmosphere as the original sculpture, where viewers engage with her fictional account of the work; on the other side she presents new works in unfired clay.
This exhibition is part of the artist’s ongoing research into how sculpture can exist within and beyond its material holdings. Cummings explores multi-channel recording as a means to collect, interpret, and re-perform ephemeral works. She questions how sense and sensation can be translated, and how objects might transport us to alternative, speculative landscapes and back again.
On February 9th, Cummings led a State of Ceramics discussion about ephemerality and recording. The conversation focused upon understanding ceramics as a time-based medium and how ephemeral work operates in relation to museums and collections. A summary of the conversation is available here.
About the Artist
Phoebe Cummings studied Three-Dimensional Crafts at the University of Brighton, before completing an MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2005. She has undertaken a number of artist residencies, in the UK, USA and Greenland, including six months as ceramics artist-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2010). Cummings was the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award in 2011 and exhibitions have included a commission for the Museum of Arts & Design, New York 2012 and a solo show at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Honolulu 2013. Cummings was awarded the second ceramics fellowship at Camden Arts Centre 2012, was the inaugural winner of the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize 2017, and was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Awards 2018. In 2019 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Brighton and is Research Associate at the Ceramics Research Centre UK – University of Westminster.