Angus Cummings - 'The Shadow of Memory'

Wednesday 20 April - Saturday 7 May 2022

Click here for artwork by Angus Cummings

"I have always been interested in old black and white family photographs, especially those from my childhood and from before I was born. They seem to have an atmosphere about them, as though coming from a different realm, as though the past were qualitatively different from the present, occupying a place imbued with a special kind of happiness. Added to this was a personal interest in time travel, along with the awareness that this yearned-for past was inaccessible, off limits.

My interest in making drawings from old photographs came from a desire to be able to inhabit the realm of the photograph. The process of putting pencil to paper and building up areas of tone, of sculpting a three-dimensional reality in that realm is the closest to having agency in the past. From this came a desire to incorporate feelings and imaginings in response to the new reality that was being rendered along with a sense of reconnecting with a childhood sense of the oceanic or divine. This led, in turn, to the creation of a kind of intermediate reality, comprising elements of nostalgia, longing and the dreamworld. I enjoy the sense of depicted people and forms looking real and tangible, but with the overall artwork having the feel of existing in a parallel universe."

(Opening paragraphs of extended artist statement as included in the catalogue essay.)