Kira Cummings
Kira Cummings is a multi-medium artist adept in an array of disciplines; painting, pyrography, photography, videography, graphic design, and animation. A Fine Art graduate of Jackson State University with a Minor in Graphic Design, Cummings holds a membership in the Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi for pyrography. Cummings is the Creative Director for The Works where she creates video and animation for musicians, interview programs, and corporate promotions as well as producing live events.
Artist Statement: Pyrography
My work explores the intersection of history, fame, and craftsmanship through the medium of woodburning. By creating portraits of famous individuals, I aim to capture not only their likeness but also the deeper essence of their public personas—immortalizing their impact in a way that is both tactile and timeless.
Woodburning, or pyrography, allows me to engage with the subject in a deliberate and thoughtful process. The slow, methodical application of heat to wood contrasts with the often fleeting nature of celebrity, grounding these figures in a raw, organic material that evokes permanence. The grain of the wood interacts with each stroke of heat, adding a unique texture that mirrors the complexity of the human experience, suggesting that behind the polished images of fame are nuanced, multifaceted lives.
By rendering these figures in wood, I invite the viewer to reflect on the enduring influence of cultural icons, while also questioning the nature of fame itself. What do we preserve? What is lost? Through these portraits, I aim to offer a moment of stillness, where the viewer can engage not just with the surface of celebrity, but with the lasting impact of those who shape our collective imagination.
Artist Statement: Black Series
Kira Cummings is a Southern Black woman challenging viewers to contemplate the opaque turbulence she must navigate each day. As a Black artist, Cummings has spent her career making a way in an art world dominated by the centering of whiteness. Realizing the daily micro-aggressions and racism experienced even in friendly spaces were being internalized in order to cope, Cummings created a body of work which would itself be a healing practice illuminating the vulnerability she feels operating as a human being at the intersection of Blackness, femininity, and entrepreneurial creative practice.
The Black series draws viewers close. Thick, sculpted masses of Lamp Black – a pure carbon pigment formulated from the residual soot of burning oil – ebbs and flows across the canvas in tempestuous wave forms reaching out to the viewer in high relief. The 12-panel polyptych work All looms across the wall, visible from across a gallery space yet its detail and form obscured by the deep black surface. As the viewer leans in close, the textures of these fragments of rough water are discerned and yet the raw surface remains impenetrable; the viewer cannot know what lies beneath causing the conflicting churn.
The work is an expansive display of vulnerability which in its process and exhibition brings Cummings a reprieve. The work begins quickly but soon slows to a crawl, the oil paints taking progressively longer to dry as layers are built; their sculpted forms requiring patience and steadiness. The contemplative work becomes a catharsis, the emphasis placed on the artists’ presence – where she has chosen to take up space and shape it. The societal expectations of the “strong Black woman” fall away, allowing Kira to be direct; liberated to share the emotions stirred by daily oppressions gnawing away at her humanity.