GARRY FABIAN MILLER - press release
20 August 2026
Garry Fabian Miller: Between the Moon and the Hawthorn is the latest in the Ashmolean NOW series of exhibitions of new works by contemporary artists that relate to historic collections of the University of Oxford.
This new exhibition presents the photographs of Garry Fabian Miller (b. 1957, Bristol) in dialogue with works from the Ashmolean by one of his key artistic influences, the prolific British Romanticist painter Samuel Palmer (1805–81). Ever since an early encounter with a Samuel Palmer painting hanging in the galleries, the works have lived with Fabian Miller ‘woven into the fabric of life as an artist’. The exhibition invites viewers to trace visual and philosophical continuities between Palmer’s Romantic vision and Fabian Miller’s life-long practice pushing the limits of photography in the dark room.
Garry Fabian Miller is one of the most progressive figures in contemporary photography, first gaining international acclaim for his series Sections of England: The Sea Horizon (1975). Since the mid-1980s, Fabian Miller has worked without a camera to explore the possibilities of light as both medium and subject. Darkness and light are intertwined inextricably in his work, with intensely saturated colour arising from their dynamic interplay. Mainly working with Cibachrome paper and traditional darkroom chemistry throughout his career, Fabian Miller has experimented with extremely long exposure times that can last for many hours, with time itself becoming a key artistic focus.
Samuel Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain, who produced pastoral paintings, drawings and etchings in a deeply personal and visionary style that characterised his art throughout his career. Palmer’s early works were landscapes around Shoreham, near Sevenoaks in the west of Kent, where he lived from around 1825 to 1835. The Darent Valley is depicted as a semi-paradise, a place he called The Valley of Visions often bathed in sepia tones under the glow of moon and starlight. It was in his early Shoreham period that Palmer created the Oxford Sepias - six ink landscape drawings, now considered masterpieces of Romanticism.
Garry Fabian Miller: Between the Moon and the Hawthorn presents works from throughout Fabian Miller’s career, spanning from his sea horizon photographs to new prints exhibited for the first time. These digital prints have been made from the unique exposures captured on the now discontinued Cibachrome paper. Since moving to rural Dartmoor in 1989, Fabian Miller’s work has developed from a cycle of daily walks in nature. He has long described Samuel Palmer as a guiding presence in his artistic development since the first encounter in the 1970s at the Ashmolean Museum when he was struck ‘by the transcendent mystery’ of his work.
Exploring shared approaches to the natural world, the exhibition brings Fabian Miller's photographs into direct dialogue with Palmer's visionary landscapes. Fabian Miller imagines his home on Dartmoor contained within an imagined circle, its radius 8 miles defined by the paths he walks. At its core is the darkroom, the place he calls The Crucible. The pictures Palmer made at Shoreham have lived in the mind of Fabian Miller during the 40 years he has spent walking his chosen ground. Fabian Miller’s works such as Our Bright Dream, 2014-15 are born out of an interest in slow looking and being present within nature, also evident in the density of blossom of Palmer’s In a Shoreham Garden (c. 1830) and the cumulus clouds that rise in Pastoral with a Horse Chestnut (1830-31). Fabian Miller’s photographs continue to evoke a profound sense of wonder at the marvels of nature that reflects Palmer’s enthusiasm for his natural surroundings and reveals a shared belief that true vision and meaning emerge from deeply understanding and repeatedly observing familiar landscapes.
Bringing Palmer's moonlit Romantic visions into dialogue with Fabian Miller's camera-less photographs, the exhibition also explores their fascination with darkness and nocturnal light. Prolonging the exposure times in his darkroom, Fabian Miller captured the unfolding of light over hours, as shown in his series Midwinter Blaze (2019). The works serve as meditative explorations of light and colour in the dark, reflecting an experimental, almost scientific, quality. With the lunar symbol as a recurring theme of his work, Fabian Miller establishes a connection between the darkroom and the theme of the night.
As the narrative unfolds through thematic constellations, the exhibition reveals an enduring dialogue between two artists united by their fascination with landscape, light and the natural world. Their works are complemented by facsimiles of rare prints from photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) held in the Bodleian Library, this with the Ashmolean’s work by William Blake, Book of Job (1826), offering an aesthetic dialogue with Palmer’s drawings whilst also situating Fabian Miller within a longer history of photographic experimentation with light, geometric forms, and the natural world.
Xa Sturgis, Director of the Ashmolean Museum, said: 'This exhibition reflects on a life-long dialogue between the photographer Garry Fabian Miller and a group of works housed at the Ashmolean which he first encountered five decades ago. Samuel Palmer’s moving and mystical ‘sepias’, among the most precious drawings in our Western Art Print Room, have lived with Fabian Miller throughout his working life - a dialogue across two hundred years between two experimental and visionary artists rooted in nature, preoccupied with light and concerned with the transcendent and the ineffable. It is a thrilling prospect to bring their works together here at the Museum where they first encountered each other.'
Garry Fabian Miller: Between the Moon and the Hawthorn is produced in partnership with Ingleby Gallery, Graham Nash, The Patrons of the Ashmolean Museum and those who wish to remain anonymous.
ENDS
CONTACT DETAILS
Matthew Brown | matthew@sam-talbot.com | +44 (0)7989 446557
Flora Guildford | flora@sam-talbot.com | +44 (0)7708 786516
Sarah Holland | sarah.holland@glam.ox.ac.uk | +44 (0)1865 278 285
NOTES TO EDITORS
Exhibition: Garry Fabian Miller: Between the Moon and the Hawthorn
Dates: 26 November 2026–13 June 2027
Venue: Gallery 8, Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PH
Admission: Free
Ashmolean NOW launched in 2023 to engage and support new artistic voices based in the UK and encourage critical conversations with, and creative responses to, the Ashmolean’s collections. To date, Ashmolean NOW has invited very different artists and perspectives to exhibit:
- Flora Yukhnovich x Daniel Crews-Chubb (8 July 2023–14 January 2024);
- Pio Abad (10 February–8 September 2024);
- Bettina von Zwehl (18 October 2024–11 May 2025);
- Daphne Wright (13 June 2025–8 February 2026);
- Soma Surovi Jannat (28 March–1 November 2026);
- Garry Fabian Miller (26 November–13 June 2026).
About the artist
Garry Fabian Miller (b. 1957, Bristol) is one of the most progressive figures in contemporary fine art photography. He gained international acclaim in the 1970s for photographs of sky, land and sea, notably for the series Sections of England: The Sea Horizon, 1975/76, which were first shown at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1979 and positioned his work in the context of the English Land Art movement. Since the mid-1980s, he has worked without a camera to experiment with the possibilities of light as medium and subject, and explores ways of re-imagining and repurposing his photographic exposures in a world beyond the darkroom, and without the materials of analogue photography. Since 1992, Miller has explored a more abstract form of picture-making by passing light through coloured glass and liquid and cut paper forms.
His work is held in private and public collections including Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok; The Gillman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Government Art Collection, London; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Sir Elton John Collection; Museet for Fotokunst, Odense; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Tokyo; National Museum of Art, Florida; Pier Arts Centre, Orkney and the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch. The Victoria and Albert Museum has the largest collection of his work, acquired over thirty years, with the Year One cabinet on permanent display in the Museum’s Print Room. Recent exhibitions include Adore (Arnolfini, 2023), and Môrwelion (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff 2023).
Garry Fabian Miller lives with his family on Dartmoor, where his work has evolved out of the cycle of daily walks that has been at the heart of his practice since the winter of 1989.
www.garryfabianmiller.com
@garryfabianmiller
Images:
Garry Fabian Miller (b. 1957)
Banner image: detail of Midwinter Blaze III, 2019
Shadow Moon, 2023
Dancing Sun (i), 1986–2020
Absolved, 2022
Light, water, Lambda c-print from dye destruction prints
© Garry Fabian Miller
Samuel Palmer (1805–1881)
Shepherds under a Full Moon, c. 1829–30
Pen and brown ink with brush in Indian ink, heightened with bodycolour on white card
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
