Faith and Fabian Miller

Sometimes we come to revelatory conclusions in life, only to realise that they are simple and universal. Recently somebody warned me that everybody needs Faith in something and I can't help asking myself, what do I have Faith in? If it is not God or Love, then what magic word can I attribute to my feeling of Faith and Spirituality in the world?

At the Shadow Catchers Symposium Marina Warner, the intellectual goddess, began the day with a lecture on the histories and contexts of Camera-less photography; phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, silhouettes. This practice was revealed to be steeped in superstitions, it explores the limits of faith and belief by capturing shadows and stealing souls. She showed us the thought projection of Hipolyte Baroduque but told us that the interest of the 'odique clouds' did not lie in the question of their authenticity. Our modern condition is of the 'disbelieving believer' she stated with absolute insight, 'we enjoy without suspending our disbelief'.

She quoted Wallace Stevens, an American modernist poet who I am now desperate to pursue;

'The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.'

Marina Warner's words chimed on with growing significance as Philosopher Nigel Warburton interviewed Garry Fabian Miller. 'I was involved with a religious phase, but thank God that's past,' Miller immediately sees the irony but continues, 'Now I'm a free spirit'. Through all the laughter and all the uncomfortable irony, this resonates. Artistic freedom, and also freedom more generally does not reconcile with my idea of religion.

Nigel Warburton christens him a 'photographer of light' but this underplays the sense of spirituality. In his own words, Garry Fabian Miller has made 'a religion out of light', he 'dedicates' himself 'to the light'.

Fabian Miller works alone in complete darkness transforming light in to dark and darkness in to light in an attempt to reach towards the 'white dematerialised end' of the spectrum. Like all artists he seeks that indefinable spirituality which belongs to our work and our passion for it. 'It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction', wrote Picasso, it is also the ultimate, all-consuming religion. This is why the Symposium was so brilliant; I had not conceived these things at the exhibition. I had not comprehended what a claim was being made about faith and contemplative art practice.

'The pictures I make are of nothing which exists in the world . . . What I am trying to suggest is a state of mind which lifts the spirits and gives strength and some kind of clarity.’_ Garry Fabian Miller, 2003

And yet his pictures are also of the plants in his garden, his walks on Dartmoor. However abstract these things become their presence remains as a shadow. If Miller has created a religion in his art it is the religion of the local and the particular. It describes the power of the local to lift us in to the sublimely spiritual. The meditation of light on a leaf or the water of Dartmoor become abstract constellations, planetary formations and orbits of light. These small things become our universe. I look in to these works of light and I willingly believe Garry Fabian Miller's fiction.

There is a kind of Faith which rests in the beauty of the world as it is. A courageous Faith perhaps? Which looks no further than the magic of leaves dancing in the wind, the natural lights of the stormy sky and the secret rhythms of water. This is my Faith; art looks at the world through a filter, which sees beyond the visible to the sublime. A sublime which already exists in the world but that is beyond the visible eye. Looking on the world with my eyes in light I know that if there is nothing more, this is enough.

Enough, enough now...

Susan Derges- Dream Landscapes

When my first medieval dream supervision came to an end I was brave enough to ask my supervisor, James Wade, about the prints I had been distractedly glancing at as we discussed the Kingis Quair. He called these etchings of beach and sea 'a kind of dream landscape'. Ever since then I have been searching for my own anachronistic dream landscape with which to approach some of the difficulties of the medieval dream. One of the artist's from the Shadow Catchers symposium, who produces photograms by exposing photosensitive paper beneath the surface of water, has gifted me with connections and openings.

Susan Derges' obsession with drawing the moon and its cycles in to her work points towards a medieval conception of the importance of the heavenly spheres ascending in intensifying circles. 'The moon was just always there in my work' it is an inherent part of her artistic and spiritual practice. In medieval cosmology the moon formed the border between the unchanging aetherial regions and the changeable nature below, in many ways it becomes Derges' border land between states of consciousness. Derges cites a connection between her work and the illuminations of Hildegard von Bingen:

'I had known her music for a long time but was completely amazed at the beauty and depth of her cosmological diagrams -particularly a long, vertical piece titled Recycling Lucifer's Fall into Humanity's glory, depicting a field of stars becoming submerged in waves of water. [...] I sensed a psychological reading of the image that might shed some light on what I was trying to articulate in the images I had just started making.'

It is her 'Arches' series which really strikes me for its connection with dream narrative. Here Derges plays with constructed, digitised landscapes and natural, incidental ones; blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality in an echo of the way dream poems move from the waking world to the dreaming world. In the Kingis Quair the dream is doubly enclosed; at first a waking vision enters the prison and then the spirit leaves the body to ascend to Venus' temple. In the same way Derges' prints move through layers of reflections, taking us further than we believed we could go.

A.C Spearing, author of medieval dream poetry, explains the long inductions to dreams as an attempt to negotiate 'being and non-being'. Comparing it to Gothic Architecture which 'cannot simply stop, it has to fade away' in curves and spikes 'by which the physical presence is gradually withdrawn and the dense material mass is dissolved into the empty air.' The medieval dream has a tendency to dissolve distinctions between narrator and reader and their sense of dream and physical world. It resists definitive ends or beginnings by moving through disorientating layers of consciousness and narrative reality. There is something in Derges too which resists finite ending; the flow of water moves out of reach of the paper, wisps of air rise out of our vision.

These Arches recall illuminated windows as they make the same vibrant, if secular, gesture upwards. The dream is a window on to another world, it offers us a chance to step in to it, however temporarily. It is a mirror of elements of reality which reflects and echoes but also inverts. In Derges' Arches we lose our memory of what comprises the real, tangible element and what is pure fantasy.

Derges' produces much of her work at night, taking prints of the river's flow, she works in the dream-time in an attempt to uncover the things which are beyond the visible. In the same way, the medieval poem uses the dream to escape corporeal restraints and access a higher spiritual knowing; those intangible, invisible concepts. The symposium wasn't an entire distraction, Derges draws me back in to the medieval dream.

Shadow Catchers

I know that this is an old post but today I am at a symposium at the V&A which ties in with the exhibition. So I shall refresh my own and your memory, in preparation for what will hopefully be an inspired post later in the week. The artists will be talking a long with somewhat of an idol of mine, Marina Warner. No work for me tomorrow just shadowy play!

Floris Neususs

Everybody has a camera now, everybody can take high-quality photographs without laying claim to any particular 'skill'. The artist's visual eye can be replicated with photo-editing tools and auto-correction. To take a beautiful photograph is no longer enough. So the question is where does photography go next? How will it adapt to survive?

The brilliance of the V&A's exhibition 'Shadow Catchers' is that it provides an answer to this question without necessarily meaning to. Not everybody can conjure beauty in to being out of a seeming nothing. I was genuinely captivated, awed, astounded (so much so that I require multiple adverbs) by these images and the revelation of the possibilities and processes available to the contemporary photographer.

Floris Neususs appeared to have emerged from the Cottingley fairy generation with his lifesize photograms of women. These Body-grams appear to have captured women in flight; here they are dancing with faint shadows of birds and moths or curled up vulnerably like netted butterflies. Neususs has taken that darkroom experiment, the photogram, and given it a larger-than-life ethereality. 'Be Right Back' has fixed the shadow of a woman beneath a now empty chair; the human trace we leave behind, the haunting beauty of a ghost narrated. In Untitled Kassel some parts of the work remain unfixed so that colour changes over time. Neususs is interested in the transience of his medium, the sense of preserving the absent and nurturing the human sense of emptiness.

Susan Derges

Photography has always harboured an interdependence with the natural world and camera-less photography engages with deep underground natural processes. Neususs leaves photo paper in the garden at night to be exposed by lightning; light appears to have scanned the paper leaving shockwaves and scars. Garry Fabian Miller's interest is botanical; photography, like photosynthesis, is about light. Translating plants and leaves to photographic paper these are precise botanical illustrations which track growth and decay. He describes his interest in light and time as the 'accumulation of days'. Susan Derges's element is water; her photograms map the water's surface, the flow of rivers, it's undercurrents and secret shifts. She creates 'sun prints' by placing her photographic paper beneath the water to be exposed by sunlight, revealing 'what underlies the visible', the 'absent moments' which until now we have only been able to imagine.

Pierre Cordier

Which leads on to the power to create and regenerate; the otherworldly. Pierre Cordier's use of the chemigram has enabled the patterning of geometries, labyrinthine formations, the emergence of strange new worlds. He describes his work as 'a mutation, hybrid and marginal- fake photographs of an imaginary, improbable and inaccessible world.' What is captured are shifting forms that offer strange glimpses of space and new dimensions. As Fabian Miller develops he moves towards more abstract images, his photo a day project is a portfolio of burning rings of light, new planets emerging. He says they are 'of something as yet unseen, which may only exist on the paper surface.'

Garry Fabian Miller

Adam Fuss's work is a combination of birth and death. His cibachrome photogram 'Invocation' is a halo of light in which a baby is baptised, the tail of a snake wriggles across the paper in another. Fuss likes to work with live animals, with symbols and ideas. But at the other end of the spectrum the My Ghost series shows a figure emerging/disappearing in smoke, a christening gown which has become a spectral shroud.

Adam Fuss

Camera-less Photography is engaged with themes of mortality; with what it can create and imagine but also with those absent, dead things it holds to the light. The Frankenstein's monster of the art world, with a little sensitivity it has the power to be truly beautiful. In those dark rooms at the V&A only the light of these images remains burned on to our retinas with the force of revelation.

I did a few experimental photograms, along with research in to the development of the process by Man Ray for my A-levels, but this exhibition makes me want to get back in to the dark room. Perhaps this is where the darkroom revival begins.

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russe was a magnificent and extensive exhibition in a way that will make it impossible to try to write about it all in a contained blog post. The exhibition is a feat which the V&A have pulled off with an elegance akin to the Ballets of Diaghilev. But I do not know much about Ballet so I will have to approach this in my own way.

First of all I will give you the V&A's introduction as a preface;

'Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev, dictator, devil, charlatan, sorceror, charmer- all names of a single man whose unique character and driving ambition caused a ferment in European culture. He embraced the modern and exploited the avant-garde, but was in many ways deeply conservative. He lived mostly in hotel rooms, but turned his company into an extended family.'

The Ballets of Diaghilev have left behind them a legacy of opulent relics; costumes of extreme fantasy, epics of scenery, programmes, posters, choreography, with colour and influence coming from all cultures across the world. I am sure that each visitor comes to this show with their own particular interests in my mind, drawn to particular elements and not others. It is this focus which I will use to write something coherent with. My interest was as an artist; Costume sketches, the graphic design of posters, prints and art works inspired by the ballet all collated to form the kind of wild sketchbook every artist wishes to claim. The ballet dancers called to be drawn, even choreographic plans formed patterns that looked like constellations. Artists inspired and involved with the Ballet were names such as Aubrey Beardsley, Georges Barbier, Leon Bakst, Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico and even Picasso!

Picasso designed the scenery for Le Train Bleu, which was a very happy surprise for me. I managed to take some sneaky photographs of Picasso performing new and unexpected tricks. This curtain towered above me as the two women hold hands and dance across the beach and the strange cubist forms of the set pieces rose up out of the ground. Diaghilev's Ballets were involved with contemporary art culture,;Picasso's contribution was strengthened by the costumes of Coco Chanel and the writing of Jean Cocteau. The ballets are creatures of fantasy but also of a cultural reality.

A failed photograph of some costumes, I got caught.

Stravinsky's Firebird Symphony and The Rite of Spring were commissions for Diaghilev (you probably know this, I am ignorant about these things) so I got to enjoy the layered rhythms of the composer as I watched a projection of giant ballet dancers skit across the red-glow of an exhibition hall. Ever since I saw my friend Catherine perform the Firebird symphony at a concert I have been captivated. When The Rite of Spring was first performed it caused a riot as it urged its audience in to chaotic frenzy. I feel something of this in the dark room with the projections.

I also made a discovery in the form of Russian Cubo-futurist artist Natalia Goncharova. Taking her inspiration from folk art, russian identity and traditional fairytales, Goncharova's sets were a labyrinth of the magical peaks of Russian architecture which I have loved since I was a child.

This post barely does it all justice, so go before it ends!

Reasons to Smile in 2011

It seems that the end of the year is not just for one particular countdown (of which there is a very funny description at Spare Time Gone Awry), but of countdown lists, the top ten best T.V moments of 2010, the top ten news stories, blah, blah, blah. I have to admit to being a bit of a closet fan of these lists; neat and ordered. I used to make one every year, a summary of what I had done, films I had seen, countries I had visited etc. This year I don't feel like making one of these lists. I have had a very rich and full list of experiences, happinesses and achievements. However the year has not come to the best of ends and I'm not sure that recalling all of that happiness is a very useful activity. So here is a list of ten art things that I will be looking forward to in 2011. Feel free to mention the things I have missed.

1. Modern British Sculpture- Royal Academy of Arts (22nd January-7th April) This year at the Royal Academy I experienced a revelation; I had always dismissed sculpture because I didn't understand it and it didn't communicate with me. Then on the recommendation of my supervisor I went to Wild Thing and all of a sudden there was the sculpture of Eric Gill, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska speaking to me of the sensuality of stone, of its fleshly corporeality. I don't doubt that the Royal Academy will bring another challenging and astounding exhibition and offer another revelation.

'The exhibition will take a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions that will challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions.'

2. Shadow Catchers Symposium (4th Feb, V&A)- Yes I loved the exhibition so much I booked myself a space on the symposium like the giant art geek that I am. The artists will be speaking and so will Marina Warner (a slight and distant hero of mine). This feels like the future of photography.

3. Venice Biennale- This is a huge event and perhaps I will be there. Art, Cinema, Architecture, Dance, Music and Theatre, where else would you want to be over the summer?

4. Eric Gill: Public and Private Art, British Museum (10th February- August 7th)- I love Eric Gill and believe he deserves appreciation. My dissertation won't be finished yet either, so I can count this trip as research!

5. Barcelona- Since I am going in a couple of weeks...it looks like I will only catch the dregs of exhibitions from 2010 but this is an art city and will be a landmark of the year.

6. The Guggenheim New York- Because perhaps, just maybe, I might be here too.

7. Lucia Nogueira, Kettle's Yard (15th January-13th March)- It would be a crime to forget the treasures of exhibitions which will be occurring on my doorstep. More sculpture, Nogueira is involved with what seems to be a kind of reclamation, her work has been described as a process of 'taking things which are close to hand and imbuing them with malignancy and magic.' A lot of exciting things are happening for sculpture next year and Cambridge will be an important part of the exploration too.

'My way of thinking is very much from Brazil: my way of picking up objects comes from there too. It is something connected with childhood and also with the Brazilian psyche. Our way of thinking is not as linear as it is in Europe ... In art you obviously have a background in art history that is very rich. We don't have that in Brazil at all ... We just do everything in a very empirical way, even art.' Nogueira

8. Henry Gaudier-Brzeska Sculptures, Kettle's Yard Talks (10th February)- the influence of Wild Thing stretches far. Brzeska has his own attic of work in the Kettle's Yard house and I am looking forward to hearing the enigmatic curator Sebastiano Barassi talk.

9. Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta- This year I discovered Finlay's garden, his contained sculpted world, just as the season was ending. I did not have time to organise a trip to Edinburgh (it would have had to coincide with the Pope's visit) and missed the dying autumn moments of the garden. When the season opens again this year I will use it as an excuse to make a trip up to the beautiful city of Edinburgh and engineer a visit to my friends in St.Andrews. The thought of the garden makes me a little feverish with excitement.

10. Future Beauty- 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, Barbican- This is a postponed trip from 2010, my friend Ralph and I are going to make a trip, it will put Chinese Vogue in to an Eastern context and give us the perfect opportunity to reminisce.

The Eric Gill Pilgrimage

The Eric Gill pilgrimage turned out to be providential. I had planned out my landmarks but was unaware how close they were together; Oxford Circus, Victoria and South Kensington formed a tightly bound prism on the tube map. Then there was the Itsu (www.itsu.com) opposite Portland Place which provided the perfect lunch and the unexpected Gill sculptures which greeted me as I entered the V&A. When I emerged from the underground at Oxford Circus I could already see the beacon of broadcasting house beckoning from just behind the lines of Christmas shoppers.

In 1932 Gill produced the Prospero and Ariel sculptures which still furnish the exterior of BBC broadcasting house. The BBC chose Shakespeare's The Tempest as a theme in order to make a cultural statement. Prospero was an 'airy' spirit who represented the airwaves of broadcasting. However Gill adapted the sculpture to his own beliefs about culture. And so Prospero and Ariel become God the Father and God the Son. When I arrive at broadcasting house in the flesh all I can see is Eric Gill's big joke on the BBC.

I assume that Gill's sculptures are details hardly noticed as commuters, businessmen and shoppers pass them by. However they are beautiful. I particularly like the detail of the wave that rides the building round as a trimming. I have seen so many photographs of these recently that I don't know what it means to have a set of my own, whether it will mean anything? Nevertheless I get in to the road and flutter about the steps of Langham church making a fool of myself with my camera.

‘Had not Prospero power over the immortal gods? At any rate it seemed to be only right and proper that I should see the matter in as bright a light as possible and so I took it upon me to portray God the father and God the son. For even if that were not Shakespeare’s meaning it ought to be the BBC’s’ Eric Gill

For Eric Gill the light of religion illuminates all creation.

My second stop, and what I assumed was my final, in the short pilgrimage was Westminster Cathedral. In the bitter cold as Christmas is nearing The Stations of the Cross with a little Catholic liturgy thrown in for good measure, seemed satisfyingly appropriate (probably more suited to Easter, but as a heathen I only have a gentle feel for these things). As a raging Catholic sculptor, although relatively unheard of at the time, Gill was asked to furnish the Cathedral's pillars with carvings of the Fourteen stations of the cross. This is Gill's 'Epic' just as The Anathemata is David Jones's; it communicates the whole history of a people and culture even if this history is uniquely that of Religion and the Passion. Mounted on pillars in Westminster these succeed in being epic.

Only one photo for you as the angles were awkward, although I did get some beautiful postcards so perhaps I will share those as a treat eventually. Red lettering and Gold details add subtle decoration, to a stark but beautifully conceived sculpture.

The final joy of the day was arriving at the V&A believing I had, had my warm cosy fill of Gill, only to be confronted by a preparatory carving for Prospero and Ariel in an alcove. I had unwittingly stumbled upon a new landmark in my pilgrimage.

To supplement my endless reading on lettering and typography there were framed tablets of Gill's typefaces. He donated them so that they could be studied by the V&A's legacy. You have no idea how often I have consulted black and white reproductions of these, now I am the student poring over them.

Gill's sculpture Mankind is a female cipher for the power of his sculpting. She is a luxurious decapitated monument to sexuality and the sensuality of stone. Gill admired tradition with such fervour but he commands a space in the centre of it all. I spent a long, long time absorbing buttocks, indents, curves and Gill's own deep admiration of the female form. Here she is for your enjoyment.

You can deny Eric Gill many things, but not this appreciation. In the V&A Fiona McCarthy's biographical revelations are irrelevancies, Eric Gill is a modern British sculptor whose influence stretches across the exhibition hall from Robert Gibbings to the student of lettering.

Magic Lantern- Mat Collishaw

I have to admit to not knowing what I expected. Perhaps I was just looking for some of the beauty that had entranced me in his Insecticide prints. In which case I can't deny that Collishaw delivered. I think perhaps I imagined that Collishaw had been granted the dome of the Victoria and Albert museum as an exhibition space. Well this is also true, but we are not as yet granted access.

At dusk I ask how I get to the dome and I am told that I will have to go out in to the street to see it. If I cross over the road I should get the best view. So I wrap up warm and dash across the road, the dome has been transformed in to a beacon of light but I am too close to discern its detail. So I skip down the street passing tall South Kensington doors and parked black taxis until I can look back and take it all in.

In the street in my madness Collishaw's Magic Lantern looks like a schizophrenic strobing of bats in the belfry, not the elegant worship of moths to a flame. But I have to put this down to my obscure perspective. I don't think that this mad dash outside as closing time approaches at the V&A is what the experience is about. This is for the outside world; a beacon to lost souls out in London who might be attracted to the Victoria and Albert museum like little moths to its potent art flame.

I have committed another injustice. When I return to the Madejski gardens to see the replica zoetrope I can gain enough perspective to feel real admiration. Here the moths are engaged in their ritual worship of the light. Delicate, fluttering forms moving faster than the eye can perceive. A zoetrope is a cylindrical device first designed in 1834, 'a rapid succession of images simulates motion'. As with Insecticide I see Collishaw playing with the modern and the traditional; digital animation and Gothic fairytale are forced together in a contemporary fusion. When Collishaw's zoetrope begins to spin on the edge of the lake magic is invoked. I wish I could get far enough away from the dome to see Collishaw 'animating the Museum's architecture with a work of haunting beauty.' For now the replica zoetrope allows me to imagine and my imagination goes wild.