An ongoing act of love
- Mar 24
- 2 min read
Words by Hannah Tapping
“Our life has been shaped by the making of the garden. It has become the most meaningful place in our world. Creating a settled state of being from which pictures have been seen, imagined, made visible.”
- Garry Fabian Miller, 2025
Internationally exhibited and represented in Edinburgh by Ingleby Gallery, Garry Fabian Miller is widely recognised for his sustained exploration of light, colour and duration and his work has expanded the language of contemporary photography over four decades.
A new exhibition at Kestle Barton will feature Fabian Miller’s camera-less photographs, focusing on works made directly from and about the artist’s garden made with his partner Naomi on the edge of Dartmoor — a landscape he describes as “15 acres of meadows, orchards, ponds and woodland”. The photographs emerge from daily engagement with this environment and form what he calls “a deeply personal response to a place”. Over time, “the heart of the garden has quietly integrated further into the wild places, the meadows, into the woods”.
Working without a camera, Fabian Miller places plants and translucent materials directly onto lightsensitive photographic paper. “Pictures were made directly from the plants and trees,” he explains. “I make pictures directly with a beam of light onto sensitive photographic paper. I intervene between the light and the paper in a darkroom to enable a range of different images to exist. The objective is to make visible the felt, or invisible, and the photographic process that I have used enables that to happen. I am interested in extreme experiences of all the light in the world and hardly any light in the world and in these places something significant can happen. So hopefully the pictures make the viewer think about these kinds of things, think about themselves, where they are and what matters. It should be fun. Life ought to be that,” in a film interview for Dovecot Studies.
At Kestle Barton, art and land are similarly intertwined. The gardens and surrounding fields are cultivated as part of the gallery’s programme, shaping how artworks are encountered. Fabian Miller’s practice extends beyond the darkroom — including Three Acres of Colour, an ongoing project on a farm in Wiltshire where dye plants are grown as fields of chromatic intensity, and collaborations with Dovecot Studios and Dash + Miller/Bristol Weaving Mill translating photographic imagery into tapestry.
The exhibition at Kestle Barton is accompanied by a new publication, Our Garden, bringing together images of the garden alongside selected works from the exhibition, with an essay by the artist. The opening will include a conversation between Garry Fabian Miller and Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. In bringing these photographs into dialogue with our own landscape, the exhibition offers an opportunity to consider the possibilities that such images can shed light onto our own existence.
Garry Fabian Miller – Our Garden. Growing. Making. Living. shows at Kestle Barton, Manaccan from 28th March to 14th June 2026.
