Lily Cummins
b.1985, Bowral, NSW. Australia 
Lives and works on Gundungurra Country,  Southern Highlands, NSW

Lily Cummins is a contemporary artist and educator, living and working on Gundungurra Country, Southern Highlands. Her practice encompasses painting, drawing, and installation art. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree (Drawing) from the National Art School (2017). Her work has been widely exhibited across Australia, and is represented in public and private collections. Recent projects include: Annual Artist Project Commission: Time to Shine, Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery (2025); The Memory Keeper’s Garden, a large-scale installation for NSW Health & Bowral District Hospital (2025); and the curtain breathes and the room glows lilac, solo exhibition at Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (2024).

Cummins’ practice investigates the complexities of the human condition. Her work unfolds as an evolving personal narrative—an exploration of self and the inner landscapes of memory. She is drawn to the processes of memorialisation and the emotive bonds people forge with place and object.

Blending figures and landscapes with architectural motifs, her work dwells in the liminal space between memory and mysticism, where domestic rituals are acts of quiet devotion. She uses a mystic lens to interrogate her interests in colour and light as visual language, to communicate the subtleties of tenderness, fragility, remembrance, absence, and loss.

Cummins’ practice is deeply process-driven. She navigates conversations through repetition, using both figurative forms and architectural structures. Investigative mark-making enables her to probe the disintegration of memory, the passage of time, and layered emotions. She is compelled by the tension that emerges through repeated and layered memories. A subtle melancholia underlies saturated colour in scenes of domesticity and dreamscapes, producing a peculiar universe of familiar yet uncanny moments.

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