Fabian Miller established his reputation from 1976 with an internationally acclaimed series of photographs depicting sea and sky made from his home in Bristol. In 1985, he stopped using a camera and has since then explored the elements of light, time and colour in camera-less images produced in his darkroom. His pictures draw from the early darkroom experiments of pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, but also connect with a Modernist tradition of formal abstraction. His work has often been placed among the context of other international artists such as Donald Judd, Elsworth Kelly and James Turrell, but also within an English tradition tracing back to J.M.W. Turner, and post-war abstract painters such as Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson. Fabian Miller’s primary themes are mediations on the interactions of landscape, memory, light, time and light-sensitive surfaces.
Exposure (five hours of light) 1 July 2005 is a set of nine sectioned prints that unify to form a single artwork, inspired by the artist’s response to his experience visiting the Hebridean island of Tiree. The prints are unique objects created by projecting light through a coloured vessel filled with water and onto light sensitive paper. The light’s path is shaped and interrupted by cardboard stencils punctured with holes.