Garry Fabian Miller Archives

Garry Fabian Miller: The Middle Place

27 June 2013, 6-7.30pm

Our June Spin event will be at the Ingleby Gallery where we will be discussing Garry Fabian Miller’s exhibition The Middle Place.

We will be joined for the discussion by David Brittain who has been involved with photography as a critic, curator, editor and documentary maker. Between 1991-2001, he was Editor of Creative Camera magazine and is presently Research Assistant/Senior Lecturer in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Paolozzi at New Worlds: Science Fiction and Pop Art in the Sixties.

 This exhibition presents a series of new abstract works by Bristol-based artist Garry Fabian Miller, alongside a very early series of seascapes made in 1976 now known as Sections of England: The Sea Horizon. In the 37 years since these images were made, the horizon has continued to be one of Miller’s central preoccupations.

Alongside the Sea Horizon images, Ingleby Gallery will also exhibit a group of new, large format, camera-less works titled The Middle Place which explore the territory which Miller describes as ‘…the meeting of earth and sky. The horizon offering the possibility of understanding our place within the world and its purpose.’

Fabian Miller’s camera-less work was featured in the 2010 Shadow Catchers exhibition at the V&A.

Garry Fabian Miller

28 October 2005 at 6pm

‘The pictures I make are of nothing which exists in the world . . . What I am trying to suggest is a state of mind which lifts the spirits and gives strength and some kind of clarity.’

Garry Fabian Miller, 2003

Garry Fabian Miller was born in Bristol in 1957. Much of his early work was landscape-based and focused on the horizon between the sky and land or sea. Since 1985, he has been producing optically mesmerising photographic works without the use of a camera or film. Instead he works directly with light, using techniques pioneered in the 19th century by William Henry Fox Talbot.

All his works are made by passing light through objects, or through filters of oil or coloured water, onto photo-sensitive paper. Its a simple, semi-controlled process, but one that constantly surprises.

The images Miller creates are essentially abstract, but there is a certain familiarity about them. They can represent a moment when day is either beginning or ending – a quality of light that we have all witnessed.

For his third exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery, the artist presents his most recent series of works Exposure, made in response to time spent on the Hebridean Island of Tiree. He first visited this remote community in 1974 as a teenager when he made his very first photographs.

Garry Fabian Miller is one of the most progressive artists working with photography today. His work has been the subject of a major exhibition at the Rencontres dArles, Europes major festival of photography in the south of France. A 256-page monograph on his work, Illumine, was published earlier in the year by Merrell.

The Ingleby Gallery has also published a book, Exposure, to accompany the exhibition.

We will be talking to Caroline Broadhurst, Gallery Manager at the Ingleby Gallery, about this incredible body of new work.