Phoebe Cummings is an artist based in the U.K., working predominantly with raw clay to create time-based sculptures and environments. Her work often combines both real and imagined botanical forms, existing as material performances that touch on themes of existence and desire. The intense labour of making by hand sits in direct oppositionto the briefness of the sculpture and its proximity to collapse. Large-scale durational works are made on site, and the same clay may be recycled and re-used at different locations through ongoing cycles of creation and destruction. The traces of the physical interactions between body and raw material are always present, with finger and palm prints exposed in the surface of the clay. The raw material takes an active role in the work, as it drips, dries, shrinks and cracks.
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 artist-residencies, in the UK, USA and Greenland, including six months at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2010 and a Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Art Centre 2012/13. Exhibitions and commissions have included the Museum of Arts & Design, New York; University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Honolulu; Thomas Dane gallery, Naples; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. She was the winner of the British Ceramics Biennial Award 2011 and the inaugural BBC Woman’s Hour Craft Prize 2017. She is a Research Associate at the University of Westminster, Ceramics Research Centre-UK
Photo by Alun CallenderPhoebe Cummings is an artist based in the U.K., working predominantly with raw clay to create time-based sculptures and environments. Her work often combines both real and imagined botanical forms, existing as material performances that touch on themes of existence and desire. The intense labour of making by hand sits in direct oppositionto the briefness of the sculpture and its proximity to collapse. Large-scale durational works are made on site, and the same clay may be recycled and re-used at different locations through ongoing cycles of creation and destruction. The traces of the physical interactions between body and raw material are always present, with finger and palm prints exposed in the surface of the clay. The raw material takes an active role in the work, as it drips, dries, shrinks and cracks.