Elisabeth Cummings

“Inherent to Elisabeth Cummings’s oeuvre are two phrases she uses to describe her manner of working and the influences that have informed her creation: ‘look and put’, and ‘it all goes into the pot’. Simplistically, perhaps, I think of her gouaches emerging from the look and put camp (but what discriminating looking! what sure putting!) and her canvases from the pot (an imaginative broth of teachers she’s had, students she’s taught, great paintings from the past, artists she’s admired and worked with, places she’s walked, sat and slept, sketches she’s laid down in the Australian bush, its deserts, hills and open plains).

Certainly to enter a space hung with her gouaches, monotypes, prints and paintings is to enter a bright world. One emerges glad to be alive at this moment; this is her great gift to the present. Yet her late works are the distillation of a lifetime’s experience of mark-making, enacted in the course of a rich personal life in which the artist has moved around places and people long gone.”

– Dr Sarah Engledow, excerpt from catalogue essay, Multiplicity, 2026