Teetering on the balance
- Feb 23
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Words by Martin Holman
Jamie Mills’s mute constructions suggest use but defy explanation. From neutral tones and varied textures emerge deep feeling and solitude, and a different sense of time – slow and archaic.
Jamie Mills talks about the sculptures he constructs as “teetering on the balance”. That is not meant as a physical description: his sculptures exert a quiet but electric presence when installed, lit and exhibited, as now at St Ives’ Anima Mundi gallery.
Their fragility, however, is also apparent. That is an example of their balance, sensitively calibrated to draw out qualities that surface in the viewer’s imagination with time. Like a relic from another epoch or culture placed mutely on display in a place of veneration or research, the metaphorical door to possibilities opens slowly.
Disconnected from the world of recognisable implements or articles from the onlooker’s daily life, these artworks possess an elusive familiarity onto which the imagination latches. Achingly beautiful in their almost abstract, cream-coloured selves, “they speak of potential purpose,” the artist says. Enigmatic in their stillness, they are engines for looking and reflecting.
As Mills adds cryptically, “things become things and then evaporate.” If the forms they acquire become too evocative, the audience loses space for invention. That is another kind of balance. For Mills wants to suspend certainty, so that a question remains open: “what are these objects?”
A key factor in judging where the line runs between the curious encounter and the threshold to a putative narrative is scale. Mills holds back from going too large, from becoming too obvious. His motives and his audience’s ideas do not have to converge.
So an engrossing arrangement like Generator is no more than a foot long in any direction. Its height is set by a vertical line of three adjacent uprights which converge at one point near its base. The delicate grouping fits into a foot-like block anchored to an almost square tray, the rim of which is raised slightly into a shallow lip. No angle is precise, and every edge appears intuited as if felt into position and handled into shape. And every shape appears improvised, as if negotiating some problem or other of structure by instinct rather than design.
For instance, how to make the slender, branching mast-like post stand up? After all, it is top heavy. So four strings draw diagonals through open space to where they attach inside the tray’s rim. That is where the upright shares a space with a coarse sphere, as if a silent conversation is taking place. And at each corner, the tray opens into spouts from where, conceivably, some liquid was drawn in the past.
No evidence exists to explain this meeting of lines, circle and square in three dimensions. They presume representation but do not answer the question: of what? Instead, they hold onto a discrete abstract geometry, one roughened by experience. Construction is inventive and built up from unremarkable materials. An element that looks like a stick actually is a stick. A quill and barb-like shape derives from a feather, and a bent arc is bone. All are rendered more raw by handling - coating in beeswax, chalk and clay, twisting tightly into thread or binding wool into a ball, darkening with graphite and fixing with resin.
Left: Forest Floor Study, 2026, vintage paper, fibreglass scrim, feather barbs, thread Right: The Watchful (To Ira), 2026, wood, copper, wool & cotton fibres, cotton, chalk distemper, thread, beeswax, resin Bottom: Generator, 2026, wood, cotton, wax, thread, chalk, kaolin, lead, beeswax, resin
These solitary and deliberate actions show how craft makes one thing into another, investing the result with its material and conceptual vigour. Once again, meaning (a word necessarily applied loosely) comes through metaphor. “This work explores a notion of time passing,” Mills says. “States of flow and stagnation, as in memories and experiences carried, inherited and shed. I think about weight, too, and fluidity, especially in forms. They can be amorphous.”
Everyday objects have fascinated human beings since well before recorded history. Archaeological finds suggest that natural forms like a particular pattern of shells, or a piece of coral or fossil, were noticed by ancient peoples and safeguarded for their visual and tactile appeal. These fragments were not conceived as art or even artefacts, but were kept for their aesthetic value. Lifted out of use, abstract thoughts were applied to them, which transformed how they were looked at. By the middle of the last century, however, the definition of art had begun to widen and found a place for that type of response to everyday things.
The most radical development occurred when the “ready-made”, objects brought in whole from the real world was accepted as a legitimate genre. Its pioneer was Frenchman Marcel Duchamp. Machine-produced articles became artworks when the artist chose them to be regarded as such. Most famously, he exhibited a factory-produced porcelain urinal in 1917, which he signed into posterity with a false name, “R. Mutt”.
Mills does not enter that territory: there is no social commentary in his approach, as there is in Duchamp or prominent post-war successors like Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. By simulating ready-made merchandise like beer cans or soap boxes in bronze and print, they made the process an art form. Hardly any contemporary progressive artwork lacks its ready-made ingredients.
Left: Facing North, 2025, wood, cotton, thread, wool, dowel, beeswax, limestone, 42 x 40 x 25 cm
Right: Receiver, 2025, copper gauze, wooden clamp, beeswax, dowel, cotton, thread, limestone, 21.5 x 12.5 x 15 cm
Bottom: Untitled (The Unreliable Narrator), 2025, bone, wood, thread, chalk distemper, beeswax, 28.5 x 13 x 10 cm
The everyday objects in Mills’s output have no commercial value or overtone. They are, he says, “finds that I was not looking for”. He adopts detritus of organic and human existence at a basic level. He collects sticks snapped, shed and fallen to the ground in town or the landscape. Walking the shores of the Lizard peninsula, near the area where he grew up, he selects from items the tide washed in. Shape or colour may be the key, or it may be length and texture. The coast is not the only source: he visits charity shops and car-boot sales, and surplus stores. In just such places, he picks out pieces of textile, finding in one the old army wash bags that assume a prominent role in his large-scale installation, A Firework for Vincent, which also gives its title to the current show at Anima Mundi.
“I recognise properties that appeal to me,” he adds. “On the one hand, there is the durability of these things and the signs they bear of use and age. Then, on the other, I see latency in them that I can work with.” Flotsam has included small, metal machine remnants or, once, a block of wood that perhaps a boat had lost at sea. Steeped in layers of paint and oil that suggested years of dowsing, he saw it jammed against gravel and rocks, and imagined the marks it could make on paper or fabric.
As he picks out these items, they are beginning their transformation in his mind. The end result will not have been formulated yet, however, unless a find fits like the missing piece in a puzzle he is already assembling. More often, objects sit about in his Penzance studio for weeks, months or longer until they fit with an idea or bring to life a new one.
This artist creates by combining. The process invites the term “bricolage”; in sculpture, that implies improvisation with diverse, unlikely materials. Their inclusion injects the metaphoric dimension, permitting simultaneous allusions to past and present. And mixing and reusing cast-off materials can unlock subconscious insights, which made the technique popular with the surrealists.
Mills does not work with lost or unneeded things that have been battered by time and used solely in order to project abject qualities. The “poverty” of his finds is not their strongest recommendation. In recent months, he has been using lead. The metal is abundant and inexpensive, but he likes its softness and malleability. It responds to handling and holds new shapes, quite unlike how metal is supposed to be. So he might combine lead with wool and cotton, as in Reliquary. One brings colour; another texture; both suggest shape. They will take marking with pigment or chalk distemper. A needle and thread can be pushed through some; others can be bent, creased, folded.
The canister-like forms in the body of Reliquary are cast from a vintage barquette mould Mills discovered while browsing in a shop. The object pleased him: how it felt in the palm. The boat shape had potential for transformation through metaphor. So he lifted it out of its culinary context and placed it in a poetic vacuum linked to shape, size, touch and that intangible “potential purpose”.
He mentions seeing at the Leach Pottery in St Ives some yunomi, a tall form of ceramic teacup from Japan, made by a resident artist from that country. With no handle, the cup is held, crude and heavy, in two hands. Mills picked up an example and felt how right it was. “Right” is only definable in aesthetic terms. “It showed what can be held in a material and a process,” he recalls. The yunomi are for daily, informal use: they are not part of the tea ritual, a fact Mills registered. His art is similarly secular and unexalted. But it stretches towards the exceptional and memorable.
The framed image titled The Valley is Deep & Its Walls Tall flips a collage of several sheets of tracing paper stitched together and coated with pigment in broad gestures into a suggestion of limitless night skies. Mystics in the Dark Ages sometimes divined spiritual guidance from contemplating the “heavens”, while others interpreted shapes in clouds. And in Forest Floor Study, a scatter of feathers barbs tethered with thread to a scrim mesh onto old found paper nonetheless imitate the sensation of aerial movement.
Left: Untitled (Eloquence), 2026, wood, linen canvas, lead, cotton, wool, chalk distemper, beeswax, resin, thread, fastenings, bramble, oil
Right: Reliquary, 2026, lead, wool, cotton, chalk distemper, thread, filler in cast from vintage barquette mould
Bottom: The Hermit, 2026, wool and cotton fibres, dyed cotton, chalk distemper, rubber, copper, beeswax, resin, bone
Being attuned now to how Mills invests ordinary materials with allusions to deeper expression, details like stitching can lead the mind in new directions. Brought together in one room are four pieces constructed from cotton and linen canvas coverings, which enclose natural fibres of cotton and wool.
One is The Hermit, an almost square cushioned surface in Mills’s almost signature tones of neutral off-white. It comprises seven rectangles of different dimensions stitched together. By its nature, sewing connects separate elements and thread repairs for reuse things that were broken and divided. Stitching is also used in surgery and healing. It is hard not to detect in this piece and in two of its three companions, The Runner and The Watchful, evocations of the body’s pliable tissue and muscle mass. “The body is implicated, “Mills confirms. “Its movement and stillness inform the folds: compression and release, ingestion and expulsion find their way into the curves and texture.”
Those qualities especially evoke in soft fabrics and sewn coverings of Untitled (Eloquence), the heads-down and limbs-tucked outline of a figure. Could it be cowering or sleeping, performing or sheltering? To whose time does it belong – to now, the past or an indefinable future condition? Unavoidable are the brambles that emanate from its form or pierce it from outside.
Cloth and stone often co-exist in these sculptures. Their relationship is built on colour and composition, since the principal element of soft chalk is the mineral calcite in the skeletons of marine plankton. The rock is built of bodies, therefore, which are repositories of memory and experience. Mills might girdle chalk in lead, or mix it on meshed trays with healing Alexander seeds, as he does under the folded sacks hanging from loops of cord that draw linear arcs above head height in A Firework for Vincent. Here, diverse materials coalesce into a memory of hurt relieved in life or a dream. The echoing whine that wraps the piece audibly was also found, then processed into a soundtrack.
Mills has emerged well-fledged in recent years as a believer in the mystery of the object. His remarkable and subtle creations open doors to unexpected encounters. Those can easily be meetings with ourselves.
Jamie Mills: A Firework for Vincent continues at Anima Mundi, St Ives, until 22nd March. All images © Jamie Mills. Courtesy the artist and Anima Mundi.
