This work will be shown in Darlings 2021, Curatorial+Co.’s annual small works group show. Darlings was created in response to the 2020 pandemic as a joyful way for artists and collectors of all backgrounds to come together and celebrate creativity and unity.

Lily Cummins is an artist based on Gundungurra land (Southern Highlands, NSW). Her practise examines both the self and the emotive bonds and attachments people develop to places, through investigative mark making and colour theory. Each piece has an ambiguous narrative, conceived through repeated forms, structures and a language of mark making that suggests the inevitable passage of time.

Cummins’ practice is intuitive and relies on her imagination to conjure up scenes of nostalgia for a memory the audience will never know or a place they have never been. However, the familiarity of these enigmatic places is deliberate as Cummins draws on her own memories to weave a dream-like patchwork of dissonant colours and marks.

Says Lily of her works: “The works are an emotional response to the landscape of Canada, the home land of my Mum. Before she died, there was a deep longing in her heart to return to her birthplace. She never made it back, so these works are a way of preserving memory. Memories of her are so slippery, i feel if i could just stretch a little further, or fall asleep a little faster i could find her, yet she remains obscured behind the haze of time. so all i can do is make drawings that link, however tenuously, me to her.”