A life well lived

As Bristol-born artist Garry Fabian Miller returns to Arnolfini almost 45 years after his first solo exhibition at the gallery, the artist looks back at his long and acclaimed career, celebrates those who have inspired him along the way and remembers “a life well lived”.

The word adore feels like a hug, which is fitting for an exhibition of work that feels a bit like a hug too,” write Jess Bunyan and Euella Jackson, co-directors of Rising Arts Agency – one of Arnolfini’s community partners. “From the way Garry Fabian Miller uses colour in his photography to make the small things in nature appear bigger – reminding us how small we are in comparison – to his tactile tapestries that make you want to wrap yourself in his art. His work pulls you in and says: 'no worries, I’ve got you, spend some time here.'”

Garry Fabian Miller has a deserved reputation as being one of the most progressive figures in fine art photography. Born in Bristol in 1957, Fabian Miller gained international acclaim for his series entitled Sections of England: The Sea Horizon (1976-77), which was shown in his first solo exhibition at the Arnolfini when he was 19.

After leaving Bristol first for Lincolnshire and then to Dartmoor, where he has spent the last 32 years, Fabian Miller abandoned making photography with a camera. Instead, he created a new, pioneering cameraless photography for which he is now known. The tools of his work became the darkroom and light, and his subject matter focused on nature, sourcing ingredients from his growing garden.

In 2017, Fabian Miller was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, which is headquartered in Bristol. Today, his work is celebrated in museums and private collections all over the world, with the largest at The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The artist’s latest exhibition, ADORE, sees not only his return to his home city but to the gallery where it all started.

ADORE begins with Fabian Miller’s first series, The Sea Horizon (197677), which have been shown at the Arnolfini twice over the course of his career – first in 1979 and again in 1997. The photographs were taken from the roof of Fabian Miller’s home in Clevedon, overlooking the Severn Estuary. They recorded the changing conditions of the sea and sky throughout the seasons. “I witnessed the unfolding of days and I started to think about myself, the weather, the light, how the cycle of the sun controls every element of what I was seeing,” Fabian Miller explained. “As time passed, I suppose I was projecting my thoughts on to the horizon and imagining what lay beyond it. I was thinking about the purpose of life, where we were travelling, what we should do. The horizon is this very powerful agency or metaphor for trying to think about the journey of my life.”

From The Sea Horizon, the exhibition moves through the many inspirations and influences, taking in the “lives lived” and “traces left” that have shaped Fabian Miller’s work. ADORE seeks to celebrate the many places that feature throughout the artist’s long and acclaimed career.

Pioneering process

Since the mid-1980s, Fabian Miller has worked without a camera, using the techniques of early 19th century photographic exploration to experiment with the nature and possibilities of light as both medium and subject. “Through cultivating plants and having an intimate relationship with them, observing their life cycle and relationship to the sun and the seasons and time, I began to figure out where I could make pictures, but I also began to realise that the camera was a problem. It was preventing me from having a direct relationship to the plant and to the light and I had to find a more direct way to do that. I put the camera away and I started printing a picture from the plant rather than using a negative as an intermediary. I tried it, I explored it and that was the beginning of life without a camera.”

Over the years, Fabian Miller has ‘photographed’ seed heads, petals, shoots and leaves by shining light directly through each found and treasured object. This has been achieved using light, time, and the muchtreasured Cibachrome chemical photographic paper – a material that is now no longer made. In the last 10 years, the artist has used up the last supplies of his Cibachrome paper and the months of lockdown, for Fabian Miller, represented the culmination of four decades of working without a camera. He experimented with longer and longer exposures to light, which led to surprising results as the paper itself had begun to deteriorate. Some of the images appear to drip like paint, dissolving in front of our eyes.

Brilliantly bold

Colour has been central to Fabian Miller’s practice since he first began extracting it from nature. In 2020, he produced The Ark, creating a family of red, yellow and blue pools of colour. These ‘pure’ colours were to become the ‘seeds’ of his most recent body of work the Colour Fields

Fabian Miller’s work – whether capturing the moment where sea meets sky or golden yellow embraces the softest pink in his latest series – seeks to show us what is hidden in plain sight. “Days are spent imagining and walking the colour fields,” he says. “Here, the most intense moments of pure colour are found, sensed and sometimes seen at the edges of vision. These places need to be cultivated and cared for.”

“Living life with purpose”

Fabian Miller’s life and art have been shaped by the artists, writers, makers and thinkers with whom he has surrounded himself and filled his home. He is inspired by the 20th century arts and crafts movement, and his heroes – the leading poets of the Romantic movement – Palmer, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Yet, he has also developed a thirst for collaboration, guided by the craft practices within which he has always aligned his work. Now, colour and light are brought to life within wool and yarn, and through film, music and poetry, as seen throughout ADORE

“As a young man I searched for people living life with purpose and meaning,” reads the words printed on the gallery wall. “Those actively trying to make a better world, in which love and care formed the core around which beauty and simplicity of living was cultivated... To my mind, the philosopher and the potter, the painter and the gardener shared an equality of purpose. There was no hierarchy of value.”

Most notably in recent years, Fabian Miller has teamed up with Bristolbased woven fabric design studio and textile trend consultancy Dash + Miller and its sister company, Bristol Weaving Mill. Together, they have been reinterpreting Fabian Miller’s unique abstract colour prints as tapestries, allowing him to re-invent darkroom exposures in different textile media. This series follows on from his work with world-renowned tapestry studio Dovecot, which was established in Edinburgh in 1912, with whom he re-made a number of his photographic exposures as tapestries and rugs.

Speaking of the collaboration with Dash + Miller in Arnolfini’s recently published book about ADORE, Garry said: “These [tapestries] have opened up a new colour world. I feel we are making something special together in the hybrid space between a Cibachrome exposure and tapestry weaving. It feels strange and wonderful.”

Skilled at working across various mediums, Fabian Miller has also been working with composer Oliver Coates. Together they created the film Last Evenings, featuring animated photographs and a soundtrack, which were performed live at the V&A. Coates has also released two new soundtracks for films made by Fabian Miller’s son, Sam, all of which are currently being shown on the second floor of the exhibition at Arnolfini.

Home has always been placed at the core of Fabian Miller’s work. Over the last three years, he and photographer Nicholas J R White have been working on a project called the Crucible. A name they have given to the small circle of Dartmoor that has been the site of Fabian Miller’s seen and imagined pictures for the last 32 years. As part of this project, White has been walking its paths, between ancient barrows and burial cairns, recording the landscape across seasons and time.

White’s atmospheric images from the series are presented in ADORE for the first time. They are shown alongside a map of the eight-mile area that makes up this imagined circle. Walks and sites related to Fabian Miller’s work have been marked upon it. “I have lived a life of walking, looking and thinking. Concentrated in one place, on the north-east edge of Dartmoor. This is home. It is now surrounded by an imagined circle, eight miles wide. I think of this as the Crucible, within which my life has been lived.”

Fabian Miller’s work has certainly come full circle. From his early hope for a “life well lived” to a celebration of a life so clearly “full of joy”. In his own words, ADORE suggests that: “we walk, we pause, [and] we look at what we wish to understand long enough and with enough attention to find an aspect of it that has rarely been seen or shared before.”

As my time with Fabian Miller came to an end, he left me with his thoughts on returning to Bristol – a city that is clearly still of great importance to him and a major inspiration: “When I chose to move away from the area, I felt that Bristol was losing its radical traditions, it had sold its soul to gentrification. Then, in the last few years, Bristol has found itself again and it’s become a non-conformist independent city, whether it be in the music scene or in art or in politics. In 2020, Bristol became a beacon for the world – the most meaningful manifestation of Black Lives Matter happened here. When I was coming back to work with Dash + Miller, I was coming back at a time when Bristol was changing. For me, it’s very emotional because I am coming back to the city that I knew growing up.

“My exhibition hopefully is going to be a lot of fun and an empowering experience for people. I hope they find things in it that I found in my experiences coming to Arnolfini when I was a young person – it helped me become who I am today and so to be back here is just wonderful.” n