EXHIBITION DATES : In person and online from 6/2 – 22/3
FOR PRESS RELEASE : click here
INTRODUCTION :
A hand plants a known seed in to soil and a known plant then begins to grow. Yet, some seeds are carried away by the wind only to find themselves on harder ground. Names too can drift over time, pausing, becoming refracted. ‘Vincent’ belonged to another, a resonance of which persists through fragments, generations and legacies, in the spaces between what was and what might have been. So let’s begin there - in the invisible line between presence and absence, a place for forcing change and letting be.
A young boy worked at a bench, coaxing fragments of the world into form. That imperative has persisted: where hands meet material, curiosity shapes ritual and play and labour are entwined. Every stitch, every mark, every found object carries a weight of memory, the trace of a body in motion, the residue of a life both lived and imagined. Each gesture holds the potential to transfigure the ordinary into something resonant – as a reliquary of matter and breath.
The work occupies thresholds. Surfaces are stitched, marked, layered and worn; objects become instruments, not only of sound or sight but of passage. Some respond to the land, some hum with memory, others simply await the listening. Here, absence is presence, darkness is ground, and matter is animated by the invisible. Through this alchemy of making, the personal becomes universal...”
A young boy worked at a bench, coaxing fragments of the world into form. That imperative has persisted: where hands meet material, curiosity shapes ritual and play and labour are entwined. Every stitch, every mark, every found object carries a weight of memory, the trace of a body in motion, the residue of a life both lived and imagined. Each gesture holds the potential to transfigure the ordinary into something resonant – as a reliquary of matter and breath.
The work occupies thresholds. Surfaces are stitched, marked, layered and worn; objects become instruments, not only of sound or sight but of passage. Some respond to the land, some hum with memory, others simply await the listening. Here, absence is presence, darkness is ground, and matter is animated by the invisible. Through this alchemy of making, the personal becomes universal...”
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The Hermit assumes a soft quilted form within which a rubber pumping valve is placed – its body breached, implying a point of contact and of dependency. The Runner, borrowing industrial materials, yields to gravity and contact, its points of friction defining both its presence and its constraints. The Watchful hovers like a human head, a convex copper arch suspending fabric, leaving an emptiness at its centre that gestures toward vigilance and memory, a dream of lineage carried forward.
Across these works, and in pieces such as Generator, Reliquary or the installation A Firework for Vincent, found materials, fibres, seeds, chalk, feathers and wax are transformed into symbolic conduits for circulation, connection and the passage of time. Chalk speaks of pressure and purity, feathers of freedom and fragility; Alexander seeds of healing and historical resonance. The materials bear traces of absorption and excretion; the body is implicated, whether as a point of contact or measure. Even the smallest paper collages - The Valley Is Deep & Its Walls Tall, Constellation series and Firmament - map time, chance, memory, topography, and relational space through folded, stitched and layered surfaces.
In relation to Burri, we feel the poetry of scarred surfaces; to Tàpies, the resonance of humble matter; to Beuys, the gesture as ritual; to Bourgeois, the intimate excavation of self; to Abramović, the body as conduit for thresholds and endurance. To Kiefer’s ruins and accumulations, echoing the folding of history, memory and the earth into form. Here, making is at once an offering, a confrontation, a listening and a reckoning.
To enter is to move lightly, to notice, to linger, to allow the work to unfold on its own terms. A Firework for Vincent is at once a self-portrait and a constellation, a memory and a possibility, a light cast into the darkened field of what might have been. It is a place where what is broken, buried or absent is neither lost nor explained, but becomes a site of transformation, a threshold of perception and an invitation to inhabit the invisible.
Joseph Clarke, 2026
“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world… we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be.”
BIOGRAPHY :
Jamie Mills is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in West Cornwall, UK. His practice is underpinned by an investigation into the dissemination of gesture between materiality and environments, referencing both the internal and the external. The work is about memory, relationships, connection and the very act of making itself. The principal working materials within his largely monochromatic vocabulary, are often sourced and repurposed from natural environments or borderlands and include salvaged remnants of fabrics, natural pigments, as well as inorganic matter that functions as a counterpoint to the organic. Pared down relationships between material narratives and process serve as allegory to psychological or emotional states; often surrounding memory, grief, and an exploration into the embodiment of these processes on a personal and universal level. These concerns facilitate a distillation of form that exists at a threshold between the abstract and the concrete, reflecting a space in which a minutia of gesture and a humility of material can communicate vital expressions of intimacy and connection. His images, assemblages and intuitively composed sound works can be viewed as markers to a series of internal journeys or rituals informed by a poetic dialogue between material, form, environment, and personal histories. Jamie has collaborated with both UK, and Internationally based artists and filmmakers, and has work held in public and private collections within the UK, Europe and the USA.
