CV + BIO
CV
Education
2016 to 2017: National Art School, Darlinghurst, Master of Fine Arts. Major drawing
2013 to 2015: National Art School, Darlinghurst, Bachelor of Fine Arts. Major printmaking
2012: TAFE Illawarra Institute, Moss Vale, Diploma of Fine Arts
2008 to 2009: TAFE, Illawarra Institute, Moss Vale, Cert IV Fine Arts
Selected Solo Exhibitions and Artist projects
2024: How to Make a Home: A collaboration of mind, body + memory, Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery
2024: Exhale, Michael Reid Southern Highlands, Berrima
2025: The Memory Keeper’s Garden, a large-scale installation for NSW Health & Bowral District Hospital
2025: Time to Shine, Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery
2024: The Curtain breathes and the room glows lilac, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Goulburn
2023: There was a time before you, there will be a time after you, Curatorial + Co, Woolloomooloo, Sydney
2021: The night drawings, Southern Highlands Artist Collective, Robertson
2020: The weirds, Curatorial + Co, Redfern, Sydney
2019: Forgetting, Southern Highlands Artist Collective, Robertson
2019: Wish you were here, Scratch art space, Marrickville, Sydney
2018: Come/Home, Scratch art space, Marrickville, Sydney
Group exhibitions
2022: So hot right now now now, Firstdraft, Woolloomooloo, Co-curated by Amala Groom, Kris Townsend and Alex Wisser
2021: Monochrome, Whitewall Art Projects, Berrima
2021: SELF, Southern Highlands Artist Collective, Robertson
2018: Corporal Temperature, PILOTENKUECHE, Leipzig, Germany
2018: Space chorus, Alte Handelsschule, Leipzig, Germany
2018: Architecture of experience, Ping Pong, Leipzig, Germany
2017: National Art School Post Graduate exhibition, National Art School, Sydney
2017: PROXIMITY, Articulate Project Space, Leichardt, Sydney
2016: Print and Paper, Factory 49, Marrickville, Sydney
Education Experience
2021-2025: Milk Bar Program, Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery
2022-2025: Art and Dementia Program, Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery
Grants, awards, publications and interviews
2023: First prize, BOCCA Art Award (March)
2023: Highly Commended Harden Art Prize (May)
2022: Critics Choice by Monte, Megan. Art Collector (July-September 2022)
2021: Feature, Highlife magazine
2021: Highly commended, Waterbrook Drawing prize
2021: Highly commended, Wingecarribee Landscape prize
2020: Feature, Art Edit magazine
2018: First prize, Wingecarribee Drawing Prize
Works held in National Art school archives and private collections
BIO
Lily Cummins is a tactile artist living and working on Gundungurra land in Mittagong, NSW. Cummins graduated from the National Art School in 2017 with a Masters in Drawing and her practice explores both her-self, her memories and the emotive bonds and attachments people develop to place.
Cummins’ work is highly process driven; conversations are created between repeated forms and structures. Investigative mark making explores the disintegration of memory and the inevitable passage of time, exclusively mining her own experience of remembrance, absence, and loss.
A recent expansion into Still Life explores the relationship between darkness and light; for one cannot exist without the other. The stillness of the flowers speaks to absence and presence, to family, love and to grief and the soft twilight of memory.
There is a tension that exists within Cummins’ work; a pervasive melancholia hiding under saturated colour permeates her scenes of familiar domesticity and dreamscapes. The results are a strange universe of at once familiar scenes combined with the uncanny.