At PICA we recognise that we are situated within the unceded lands of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation. We pay our respects and offer our gratitude to Elders past and present, and to those emerging leaders in the community. We acknowledge all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the importance of their care and continued connection to culture, community and Country.

Always was, always will be.

We are open 10am–5pm. Our exhibitions are always free.

Alice Cummins

Quick Response Residency

Quick Response Residency

Alice Cummins will draw on her extensive embodied and theoretical knowledge to collate and create scores for dancing and making. These specific scores will be used for a publication; a resource for dancers and artists interested in embodied performance making and an introduction to somatic explorations for the general public. The scores and provocations will be realised through embodied attunement with the Australian environment.  

Alice Cummins is a multi-disciplinary artist working in dance, film, performance and installation. She makes solo and collaborative performances with writers, musicians and visual artists. Her five decades of embodied research, which explore the nuanced intelligence of the moving body, interrogating and challenging its social and cultural narratives, have led to compositional refinement and the distillation of experience into physical performance where aesthetics, ethics and physiology converge. An eco-feminist ethos anchors Alice’s experiential and conceptual frameworks. Her creative process includes movement, touch, writing, listening and conversation. Somatic attunement connects the interiority of her studio practice with a deep listening to the natural and built environments.  The materiality of Alice’s work emerges from this attention to inner and outer worlds, inviting an intimacy with the body and place. Her current performance projects reflect the entwinement of personal/artistic, colonial and planetary histories. Cummins’ recent solo performance terra, (Holmes a Court Gallery, January 2024), reflected these elements. Now in her 70s, Cummins feels privileged to be an elder and mentor to a generation of performance makers and dancers. 

Supporters

PICA’s Studio Program is supported by PICA’s Art Ambassadors.