Seán Cummins

Studio C6

I make paintings based on enduring sessile objects such as plants, soil and rocks. Michael Marder’s concept of Vegetal Being informs my practice. Using this source material, I make drawings and colour studies, enlarging these studies to create paintings in series. Although I use a variety of approaches, my ambition is to use painterly strategies of flatness and colour to develop the source material. The colour evokes a strange after-image that comes from looking intensely at familiar forms. I am interested in how my paintings can become metaphors for survival, for a kind of other worldly renewal. I use colour to evoke an imaginary visceral space that is normally closed to us. Being sensitive to the continual performance of re-adjustment, of manipulating and juxtaposing colour and shape is vital. Slowly the work evolves, informed by my own experience of surviving cancer.

My work reflects my experience of grief and mortality by placing value on an intimate moment of renewal. As part of my recovery from cancer I was taught mindfulness of observation that I now apply to my practice. Drawing plants then re-drawing, translating light into temperature of hue and transcribing further using negative shapes, I have devised a process that joins up many of my past interests. I transform the image with drawing and painterly strategies whereby flatness, shape and colour are prioritised. The aim is to give new life through a subversive representation that emphasises slowness, intimacy and devotion.

This process uses negative shapes and colour to accentuate absence, giving the work an otherworldly quality. Using a negative figure ground relationship makes the image both absent and present. The representation is both there and not there, this duality hinges on a thinness of presence. Plants are still to the naked eye yet they propagate and thrive. When the day-to-day structures of life fail me, returning my gaze to small pleasures, investing in an intimate moment, shows me that both personal and artistic renewal can be closer to home.

 Seán Cummins completed his BA (Hons) Fine Art and an MA Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic in 1989. He went on to complete an MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths in 2000. Between 1993 and 1999 Seán was a Co-Director of Gasworks in Vauxhall, London where he curated several exhibitions. He has exhibited across the UK and internationally. Seán recently 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 attended artist workshops and residencies such as The British School at Rome (Abbey Fellow), Thupelo in Capetown, South Africa, Vermont Studio Center USA and Triangle Artist workshop New York.