Jamie Mills at Hweg

Martin Holman

Like a lot of good art, the work of Jamie Mills is hard to photograph. The combination of textural materiality and its delicate transformation into potent objectivity by careful, repetitive and almost anxious handwork defies capture by the mechanical lens and waits instead for the close scrutiny of human sight. Mills' solo show called ‘Sanctuary (A Space Under the Tongue)’ at Hweg, the Penzance gallery that has in its first year of operation injected the fresh spirit of contemporary enquiry without regional borders to compete with West Cornwall's otherwise jaded institutional art ecology, also benefits from owner Joe Lyward's sensitive presentation of frequently delicate artworks in a small town-centre space.

Mills' work suits the environment: it is careful, attentive, intimate and fragile in the way relationships should be between people. His interests are not distracted by surface concerns like colour, texture, expressive gesture. His work has all those properties but applied as well-tuned signals towards more searching matters. The subtlety of his choices is the product of working out what every material, stitch, tone and boundary could mean to him and a significant other (a role he temporarily accords the viewer for the purposes of hoped-for interaction). Colour is closely toned in shades of cream, ochre and brown: line is sewn, gathered or hung.

The two ends of Coda (2023) are drawn by a fine thread of seaweed (syctosiphon lomentaria) that hangs in unequal lengths over two quills that project a short way out of the wall so that a second line ghosts the physical one in shadow. I like how Mills, after the precision of this description (and the rather exotic tone of the botanic terminology), then describes another material in the same piece as ‘unknown’. Materials found on walks are altered by gesture into some expression, perhaps, of intimate human affairs or as ambivalent formal propositions. Does Mills find his sanctuary in finding as well as making, in repetition, ritual, loss and retrieval (all apparent here on the level of metaphor)? Or does he admit that it is hard to find in any dimension, spiritual or concrete?

I do not picture the artist making these pieces in a large studio, with bare boards for a floor, a high ceiling and tall windows that let light and air pour in. I imagine him in a small room, perhaps seated on a chair with the materials he is working gathered in his lap as he bends forward in concentration to mark them with needles, pins or gentle burnishing. Those may not be the circumstances but somehow the spirit in this work resides in such a tender rapport.

Miles Davis is quoted as saying about music that it exists in the spaces rather than the notes. The spaces in Mills' art are articulate and evocative.
 

Jamie Mills: Sanctuary (A Space Under the Tongue) took place at Hweg, Causewayhead, Penzance, 28 October – 25 November 2023 (extended to 9 December 2023)

see http://www.artcornwall.org/exhibitions/Hweg/Jamie_Mills.htm for more installation shots

© Martin Holman