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Referring back to that moment,
Is that where one surrenders? To implicate all resolute dependencies, discriminatory against seeing –
Really seeing.
As the gorse sets to the air, and the ash settles back into the ground.
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Jamie Mills’ practice is underpinned by investigation surrounding the dissemination of gesture between materiality and environments – referencing both internal and external landscapes. These concerns are underpinned by an interdisciplinary approach to working and are often made manifest through the renderings of materials or sounds sourced or retrieved via immersion into nature or borderlands, or with particular reference to his aural works, articulated and manipulated through unorthodox instrumental preparations and the incorporation and processing of field recordings. Pared down relationships between material and process serve as allegory to psychological or emotional states, in turn facilitating a distillation of form that exists at a liminal threshold between the abstract and the concrete.
Mills’ physicality of mark-making and treatment of material, can be read as constituting a reality constructed not by the sole surface representation of any individual element (or part) alone, but instead, the artists reality is articulated through the relationships and the spaces between elements. In other terms, it is work that requires both on one hand a stepping away from, and on the other an immersion into, in order to extract an empathetic understanding of the essence of the work that presides from both a conscious and subconscious narrative.
Universally inherent within his process of rendering, there is a conscious dialogue between, on one hand material intent (or ‘essence’) and on the other, control, (or the relinquishing of control), so as to make work that negotiates thresholds and occupies at times a liminal status. In this sense Mills’ images, assemblages, or intuitively composed sound works become markers to a series of internal journeys or rituals informed by an often poetic dialogue between material, form, environment, and its histories.
Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.
– Jalal ad-Din Rumi
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Where is the place you inhabit?
(Within boundaries) sound divides, re-frames – the silent echo.
Walls retract, breaching our solitary conviction of words.
What is said is undone, over and over.
Sustained belonging.
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