Lucy Cummins
Attending
“Time moves at different speeds, in many forms, in all directions.
Beneath us, through us, within us. If we recognise a different kind of Time, can we come to dwell within it?”
Emmanuel Vaughan Lee
My practice and research explore these “different kinds of Time”
With slow and often meditative making processes I experience a slowing down, a tuning in to a more grounded way of being. The ticking clock of mechanised Time becomes less crushing. By slowing down Time into moments, breaking down flows into marks I am choosing to give attention to how the smallest details come together to form an interconnective whole. I move between the relationship of the individual with the universal.
My work also draws on Sacred Ecology’s ideas of the world as a collective whole made up of many parts. Human and non human, animate and inanimate, all infused with the same energy, made from the same matter. One system of interdependent individual parts.
In inviting the audience to participate in the curating and creating of this work I am asking for people to take time, to take care. To give their attention and presence. To consider their part in the co dependent whole.
Play the Museum
Playing The Museum is a collaboration between The Holburne Museum in Bath and Bath Spa University M.A Fine Art Students.
This interactive work was created as a response to two pieces in the museum’s collection and the dialogue which I felt they created, situated as they are in close proximity to each other.
The first, The Plantation Day Book, dating from 1722 would have contained the names of enslaved people. However at some point in it’s history those pages have been removed…. the names lost.
The second piece is a work by Edmund de Waal titled “in time ”. Made from porcelain and marble it’s accompanying text refers to the past and the present.
For me their proximity spoke of the fragility of our stories…. names and identities.
My response is made up of passport sized, hand bound books. Blind embossed with Xs which tumble from the pages and emerge into the light. The work reflects on the fragility of individual stories, calling to mind lost names, silenced voices and the ephemeral ties which flow through time.
For the duration of the installation visitors were invited to take a spool of thread as they passed my work on their way to see the Day Book and de Waal’s installation. To hold the spool as a grounding anchor and then to place it amongst the books as a mark of memory and attention.
