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We first encountered Garry Fabian Miller’s work 25 years ago, in 1997, when the Arnolfini in Bristol exhibited his project Sections of England, the Sea Horizon the (extraordinarily precocious) body of work that Miller had begun 20 years previously, aged just 19. At the time I was working as an art critic for ‘The Independent’, whilst we worked out how to start the gallery that would open the following year. As I wrote in a review of that exhibition - the Arnolfini was “…an appropriate venue for Garry Fabian Miller's exhibition, not least because of the gallery's physical proximity to the place overlooking the Severn Estuary where this work was made, but also for the role that the Arnolfini has played in Miller's personal history”. Bristol was his hometown, where, as a young man, he briefly managed his family’s photography business, and where, at the Arnolfini in the summer of 1975, he saw ‘Artists Over Land’: an exhibition which included work by Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, which led him to ideas of ‘place’ and to the experiments with landscape photography that followed.
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Garry Fabian MillerSections of England: The Sea Horizon No. 25, 1976-1997dye destruction print
artist's proof11 x 11 cm
4 3/8 x 4 3/8 in
(print)This extensive series of photographs of the horizon bisecting sea and sky were made with a conventional camera fixed to a static point on the roof of the house where he lived at Clevedon, south of Bristol, looking west across the estuary towards the coast of Wales. They were taken at irregular intervals over a period of 18 months with the subject, format and photographic technicalities of lens and film, all remaining constant, so that all that changes from one image to the next is the time of day and the weather.
It's an amazing body of work that would be worthy of note at any point in an artist’s career, but for someone who was still a teenager it represents a staggeringly mature achievement. After showing a few examples in 1977 (including at the Arnolfini and the Serpentine Gallery in London) the series all but vanished for two decades before being rediscovered in the nineties by curators at the V&A and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, struck by its anticipation of ideas that were by then associated with several other artists (Hiroshi Sugimoto's work on the same theme, for example, didn't emerge until a decade later).
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Garry Fabian MillerSections of England: The Sea Horizon No. 15, 1976-1997dye destruction print
artist's proof11 x 11 cm
4 3/8 x 4 3/8 in
(print) -
Garry Fabian MillerSections of England: The Sea Horizon No. 19 , 1976-1997dye destruction print
artist's proof11 x 11 cm
4 3/8 x 4 3/8 in
(print) -
Garry Fabian MillerSections of England: The Sea Horizon No. 21, 1976-1997dye destruction print
artist's proof11 x 11 cm
4 3/8 x 4 3/8 in
(print)
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Not surprisingly perhaps, for an artist who was still so young, the Sea Horizons proved a hard act to follow and for several years Miller struggled to find an equivalent way of working. During this time, he looked with increasing intensity at the natural world, in particular focussing on snow and ice, and then on mosses, algae and plant life (a very rare hand-printed folio publication titled Green Grain containing 19 photographs was released in 1984 by Garry’s own short-lived independent publishing venture The Reed Press, ostensibly in an edition of 6, although Garry has since admitted that only two or three of the folios were ever assembled).
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Garry Fabian MillerAnne, Allium, Homeland, June, 2011Flower, light, unique dye destruction prints18 x 76.5 cm
7 1/8 x 30 1/8 in
(each print, framed) -
Garry Fabian MillerHonesty Section. Summer, Autumn, Winter - Lowfield Farm, Lincolnshire, 1987Seed head, light, dye destruction prints
35 x 98 cm
13 3/4 x 38 5/8 in
(framed)
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In 1985 Miller made a radical step - giving up the camera altogether and putting the plant form itself directly in line with a source of light so that its form and colour was transferred onto a piece of light sensitive (Cibachrome) paper. And so began his experiments into camera-less photography, taking the first principles of photography as pioneered by the likes of William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s - the action of light on light-sensitive paper - to make works of growing and gathering complexity. The science of this is quite simple. Miller uses 'positive' photographic paper that has been coated in layers of dyes (red, blue, green - the three primaries from which all other colours can be made) and by manipulating a beam of light on its way from source to the surface of the paper (sending it through coloured liquids to pick up 'pure' colour and then through objects and constructions to make shapes that allow light through, or block sections to keep it out). The works made in the darkroom in this way are unique, one of a kind, prints - each new experiment effectively a leap of faith guided by the knowledge of past, but with the results unseen until being developed. In this way he often works in series, making small changes from one day to the next, often with enormously long exposures.
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Garry Fabian MillerThoughts of the Night Sea - September 2, 2000unique light, water dye destruction print46 x 61 cm
18 1/8 x 24 1/8 in
(print)
51 x 66 cm
20 1/8 x 26 in
(framed)The importance of place, of rootedness, continues to motivate Garry’s work four decades after those first Sea Horizons. For the past thirty years, he has lived and worked on Dartmoor in a studio darkroom and home that he has shared with his family, high on the moor where he walks every day in pursuit of the moments of light that sustain and guide his way of seeing the world. As he said in a recent interview in the Journal of the Royal Society of Photography – "Landscape, Home: These are the sites from which my pictures come. The primary focus of my life is my relationship with the sun - all my adult life has been based around its arrival and its end, and how I engage with it across the day."
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Garry Fabian MillerFrom the Red Pool, November 30 2004unique light, water, dye destruction print59 x 151 cm
23 1/4 x 59 1/2 in
(print)
78 x 169 cm
30 3/4 x 66 1/2 in
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Garry Fabian MillerEquos Single No.25, July, 2006unique light, water dye destruction print40.6 x 50.8 cm
16 x 20 in
(print)
45.7 x 55.9 cm
18 x 22 1/8 in
(framed)The plant works have continued throughout Garry’s career (and have a huge importance as both a personal attachment to place, and a kind of seasonal self-measuring) but it is his work as an abstract picture maker, investigating light and colour, that has established his place as one of the most progressive artists working with photography today.
Light is his subject, and his medium, but in recent years he has had to accept that that the tools which have allowed his life of experimental picture making are fast disappearing. The photography industry’s shift to digital means that his paper and processing fluids ceased production some time ago, and so, like other artists whose work relies on these analogue methods, Garry stockpiled supplies. Over the last few years, he has eked these out in what he has come to define as an endgame in which the materials themselves are playing an active role - the now corrupted chemistry leading to dissolving and unexpected images.
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Garry Fabian MillerThe Darkroom's Fading Presence, 2020Light, oil, Lambda c-type print from dye destruction print
Edition of 3 with 2 APs, this is AP1.116.4 x 121.6 x 6.4 cm
45 7/8 x 47 7/8 x 2 1/2 in
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Garry Fabian MillerDarkroom's Erasure, 2020Light, oil, Lambda c-type print from dye destruction print
edition of 3 with 2 APs, this is AP1111.3 x 111.3 x 6.4 cm
43 7/8 x 43 7/8 x 2 1/2 in
(framed)
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Over the last decade, in parallel to the extinction of his precious Cibachrome, he has embraced a new way of working in collaboration with the photographer and colour scanning specialist John Bodkin, a decade, as Garry describes it “spent exploring and connecting the worlds of chemical and digital colour space”. Bodkin’s understanding of new technologies, and in particular the Lambda c-print process has introduced the possibility of a new kind of camera-less image made on a larger scale, capturing the last Cibachrome experiments in a new paper that turns out to have the same qualities (particularly in the ability to hold a balance between solid and fluid colour) as the originating Cibachrome print.
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Garry Fabian MillerThe Colour Field: a fluctuating blue touches the red, 2021Light, water, oil, Lambda c-type print from unique dye destruction print
edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs106 x 106 cm
41 3/4 x 41 3/4 in
(print)
127 x 127 x 7.6 cm
50 x 50 x 3 in
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Garry Fabian MillerThe Colour Field: red embraces blue, 2021Light, water, Lambda c-type print from unique dye destruction print
edition 3 of 3 with 2 APs106 x 106 cm
41 3/4 x 41 3/4 in
(print)
127 x 127 x 7.6 cm
50 x 50 x 3 in
(framed)
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Garry Fabian MillerThe Colour Fields: the place where gold and pink touch, 2021Light, water, Lambda c-type print from unique dye destruction print
edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs125.7 x 200.6 cm
49 1/2 x 79 in
(print)
145.4 x 221.6 x 7.6 cm
57 1/4 x 87 1/4 x 3 in
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Garry Fabian MillerThe Colour Fields: green encloses the softest pink / pink enclosing the green field (diptych), 2021Light, water, Lambda c-type print from unique dye destruction print
edition 2 of 3 with 2 APs116.8 x 139.7 cm
46 x 55 in
(each print)
132.7 x 161.9 x 7.6 cm
52 1/4 x 63 3/4 x 3 in
(each frame) -
The idea of these new works, and indeed of Garry Fabian Miller as an artist, as a bridge between old technologies (old learning if you like) and new possibilities, is an important thing to grasp. He continues to pursue new methods of making in a truly pioneering way, even whilst the materials on which he depends come to an end. The support of various important institutions, including the V&A in London (home of the National Photography Collection) and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, at this moment in which he continues to find ways to work meaningfully beyond the lifetime of his medium, brings us to a place of new possibilities.
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Garry Fabian MillerA Lost Colour Palette, 2021Light, water, Lambda c-type print from unique dye destruction print
edition 2 of 3 with 2 APs85.3 x 256.5 cm
33 5/8 x 101 in
(print)
106.4 x 277.5 x 7.6 cm
41 7/8 x 109 1/4 x 3 in
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Garry Fabian MillerThe Colour Fields: the golden land holds the blue and red, 2021Light, water, Lambda c-type print from unique dye destruction print
edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs125.7 x 200.6 cm
49 1/2 x 79 in
(print)
146.7 x 221.6 x 7.6 cm
57 3/4 x 87 1/4 x 3 in
(framed) -
Almost certainly the future will involve a further step back to move forward and his research has already begun into a new kind of colour production which looks to Ethel Mairet’s research into planted colour which culminated in her 1916 publication A Book on Vegetable Dyes. Fittingly, this brings us back to the context of land art in which Garry first started, but this time with a project that involves planting Three Acres of Colour – a proposal to grow the primary colours in the English landscape. Amongst the final works made on Cibachrome in the dark room are those that he has collectively titled The Ark – an exploration of the three primary colours through exposures of vastly differing lengths – a repository of colour knowledge to take forward into the future.
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Garry Fabian MillerThe Ark, 2020light, water, oil, twenty-seven unique dye destruction prints40.4 x 29.7 cm
15 7/8 x 11 3/4 in
(each print) -
The next chapter belongs to a story which will continue to unfold, but at its heart is what Garry’s describes as his ‘deep kinship’ with Mairet’s view that “strong and beautiful colour is an essential to the full joy of life”. It is a code by which he has lived his own life, and which is perfectly expressed by these latest works.
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Garry Fabian MillerFollower of the Ark (Triptych), 2020light, water, oil, three unique dye destruction prints43.6 x 33.2 x 4.5 cm
17 1/8 x 13 1/8 x 1 3/4 in
(each print, framed)
NOTES ON GARRY FABIAN MILLER, 25 YEARS ON, BY RICHARD INGLEBY
Current viewing_room