Jamie Mills 'Essence of a Word I, II, III'
archival pigment print on 308gsm Hanemuhle photo rag    .   35 x 29 cm each (triptych)


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Jamie Mills lives and work in West Cornwall. His practice is underpinned by investigation surrounding the dissemination of gesture between materiality and environments – referencing both internal and external landscapes. These concerns are reinforced by an interdisciplinary approach to working and are made manifest through the renderings of sounds or materials often sourced or retrieved via immersion into nature or borderlands, and with particular reference to his aural works, articulated and manipulated through unorthodox instrumental preparations and the incorporation and processing of field recordings. The term ‘gestalt’ refers to a concept within psychotherapeutic fields, inferring that the nature of a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Max Wertheimer wrote on the nature of the theory – “there are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.” Mills’ employment of the mediums of photography, sound and mark-making can be read in this sense whereby a reality is constructed not by the sole surface representation of any individual element alone, but instead there is a sense that the artists reality is presented 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 framework of mind. 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’ “intuitively composed” sound works, and his images or assemblages become markers to a series of internal journeys or rituals informed by an often poetic dialogue between material, form and environment.