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Garry Fabian Miller
Exposure (5 hours of light) June (2) 2005 by Garry Fabian Miller (c) Courtesy of the artist and the Ingleby Gallery
Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh
27 October 2005
_‘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. It’s 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 d’Arles, Europe’s 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.