Garry Fabian Miller: 'Our Garden. Growing. Making. Living.'

Gardens and ancient trees shape both Garry Fabian Miller’s home on Dartmoor and the land surrounding Kestle Barton. We are delighted to show his work— made directly from the trees, plants and light within his own garden — in dialogue with our garden and fields beside the gallery.

Our life has been shaped by the making of the garden. It has become the most meaningful place in our world. Creating a settled state of being from which pictures have been seen, imagined, made visible. An ongoing act of love. (Garry Fabian Miller, 2025) Kestle Barton presents an exhibition of camera-less photographs by Garry Fabian Miller, whose work over four decades has expanded the language of contemporary photography. Internationally exhibited and represented in Edinburgh by Ingleby Gallery, Fabian Miller is widely recognised for his sustained exploration of light, colour and duration. This exhibition focuses on works made directly from and about the artist’s garden made with his partner Naomi on the edge of Dartmoor — a landscape he describes as ‘15 acres of meadows, orchards, ponds and woodland’. The photographs emerge from daily engagement with this environment and form what he calls ‘a deeply personal response to a place’. Over time, ‘the heart of the garden has quietly integrated further into the wild places, the meadows, into the woods.’ Working without a camera, Fabian Miller places plants and translucent materials directly onto light-sensitive photographic paper. ‘Pictures were made directly from the plants and trees,’ he explains. ‘I make pictures directly with a beam of light onto sensitive photographic paper. I intervene between the light and the paper in a darkroom to enable a range of different images to exist. The objective is to make visible the felt, or invisible, and the photographic process that I have used enables that to happen. I am interested in extreme experiences of all the light in the world and hardly any light in the world and in these places something significant can happen. So hopefully the pictures make the viewer think about these kinds of things, think about themselves, where they are and what matters. It should be fun. Life ought to be that.’ (from a filmed interview with Dovecot Studios) At Kestle Barton, art and land are similarly intertwined. The gardens and surrounding fields are cultivated as part of the gallery’s programme, shaping how artworks are encountered. Fabian Miller’s practice extends beyond the darkroom — including Three Acres of Colour , an ongoing project on a farm in Wiltshire where dye plants are grown as fields of chromatic intensity, and collaborations with Dovecot Studios and Dash + Miller/Bristol Weaving Mill translating photographic imagery into tapestry. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, Our Garden , bringing together images of the garden alongside selected works from the exhibition, with an essay by the artist. The opening will include a conversation between Garry Fabian Miller and Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. In bringing these photographs into dialogue with our own landscape, the exhibition offers an opportunity to consider the possibilities that such images can shed light onto our own existence. About the artist Garry Fabian Miller (b. 1957, Bristol) has sustained an exhibiting career of more than four decades and is widely regarded as a significant figure within contemporary British photography. Since the early 1980s his work has been shown extensively in the UK and internationally in both public institutions and leading commercial galleries. He is represented in Edinburgh by Ingleby Gallery. His photographs are held in major public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Museum of Wales, as well as in numerous other national and international museum and private collections. He is an honorary fellow at the Bodleian Library Oxford, who published his memoir Dark Room . In December he has a new show - Between The Moon and The Hawthorn – opening at the Ashmolean in Oxford. This brings together his work made on Dartmoor in the place he calls the Crucible with Samuel Palmer’s pictures of 1825-30 created in the place he called The Valley of Visions in Shoreham, Kent. Through sustained experimentation and exhibition, Fabian Miller has contributed to an expanded understanding of what photography can encompass, establishing a body of work that is materially rigorous and conceptually resonant. www.garryfabianmiller.com @garryfabianmiller About the venue Kestle Barton is an ancient Cornish farmstead situated above the Helford River. Following an award-winning conservation and conversion project the beautiful old farm buildings have new uses, one of the barns becoming an elegant gallery that opened in 2010. From early April to late October each year, the gallery, garden and wildflower meadow beyond, hosts a programme of three free exhibitions and a number of other events. Surrounding barns and the old farmhouse have been converted into stylish and comfortable holiday accommodation, all profits from which go towards funding the exhibition and event programme.

What to expect:
Photography