An Interaction of Mind and Matter: Part 1 Sculpture

Andy Cumming is a multidisciplinary artist working across printmaking, mixed media painting, film, sound, and installation. He was selected for the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries exhibition in 2010, receiving both the Royal Scottish Academy and Edinburgh Printmakers awards. His work is held in public collections including the Stirling University Art Collection. His practice began with a fascination for how children create—intuitively, playfully, and without formal boundaries. This evolved into a wider investigation of the evolution of creativity, drawing parallels between stages of child development and the learning processes of artificial intelligence, where knowledge emerges through repetition, trial, and adaptation. While studying for a Master’s in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art, he began incorporating technology—video projection, circuit-bending, and immersive installations—to explore how digital culture affects perception, belief, and memory. Collage and mixed media reflect a psychological impulse to reconstruct meaning from fragments—mirroring how we process memory, myth, and history while embracing chance, intuition, and complexity. These forms echo archaeological reconstruction, often blurring into fantasy, touching on ideas around lost civilizations and rewritten histories. Cultural figures like Grant Morrison and Terence McKenna have influenced his thinking. Morrison’s reality-bending narratives and mythic structures align with Cumming’s role as artist-as-mythmaker, while McKenna’s visions—of a future growing increasingly strange through accelerated technology and shifting consciousness—resonate with his explorations of reality in flux. His 2018 project Adam Linklater: Mythopoeia, exhibited at the Edinburgh Art Festival, embodied these themes through a fusion of film, collage, photography, and performance.