Garry Fabian Miller: Deep Time

Garry Fabian Miller’s photography is a distillation of the light and colour of his Dartmoor homeland. It emerges from what he witnesses at the beginning and end of each working day while walking a circle of open country that surrounds his studio. The first lockdown of spring 2020 sharpened a ceremony that has always been central to his practice and it has generated ‘Deep Time’, a sequence of radiant new work that measures his connection with the world in transition.

The pandemic allowed Fabian Miller clarity of focus and purpose, but it also accentuated the uncertainties he already knew he was facing because of the demise of the Cibachrome chemistry that sustained his interest in pure colour for nearly 50 years. Crucially, it has resulted in the loss of his darkroom as the fulcrum of his universe.

In these latest compositions he uses the last of his materials to explore the anxious liminal space where colours mix and merge and resonate like diminishing and reshaping musical chords.

They re-affirm his belief in extracting the glorious core elements from nature into his work ‘to make visible things that are invisible’ and to interrogate harmony and balance. They are the richer for acknowledging in their unresolved in-between spaces that he must adapt.

Here, talking about the struggle with deteriorating materials, he catches the moment: ‘Where once there was control – measurement, timing, careful repetition – now there is often blind chance… chaos… meltdown.’ Yet within this chaos there is calm; each piece mirroring the meditative landscape that he calls home, they ask the viewer to take a moment of reflection in colour.