Jamie Mills 'A Firework for Vincent'

Jamie Mills A Firework for Vincent

“Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the
world… we must learn an inner solitude wherever or
with whomsoever we may be.”
Meister Eckhart

A Firework for Vincent
A hand plants a known seed in to soil and a known
plant then begins to grow. Yet, some seeds are carried
away by the wind only to find themselves on harder
ground. Names too can drift over time, pausing,
becoming refracted. ‘Vincent’ belonged to another,
a resonance of which persists through fragments,
generations and legacies, in the spaces between what
was and what might have been. So let’s begin there -
in the invisible line between presence and absence, a
place for forcing change and letting be.
A young boy worked at a bench, coaxing fragments of
the world into form. That imperative has persisted:
where hands meet material, curiosity shapes ritual
and play and labour are entwined. Every stitch,
every mark, every found object carries a weight of
memory, the trace of a body in motion, the residue
of a life both lived and imagined. Each gesture
holds the potential to transfigure the ordinary
into something resonant – as a reliquary of matter
and breath.
The work occupies thresholds. Surfaces are
stitched, marked, layered and worn; objects become
instruments, not only of sound or sight but of
passage. Some respond to the land, some hum with
memory, others simply await the listening. Here,
absence is presence, darkness is ground, and matter
is animated by the invisible. Through this alchemy
of making, the personal becomes universal.
The Hermit assumes a soft quilted form within which
a rubber pumping valve is placed – its body breached,
implying a point of contact and of dependency. The
Runner, borrowing industrial materials, yields to
gravity and contact, its points of friction defining
both its presence and its constraints. The Watchful
hovers like a human head, a convex copper arch
suspending fabric, leaving an emptiness at its centre
that gestures toward vigilance and memory, a dream
of lineage carried forward.
Across these works, and in pieces such as Generator,
Reliquary or the installation A Firework for Vincent,
found materials, fibres, seeds, chalk, feathers and
wax are transformed into symbolic conduits for
circulation, connection and the passage of time.
Chalk speaks of pressure and purity, feathers of
freedom and fragility; Alexander seeds of healing
and historical resonance. The materials bear traces
of absorption and excretion; the body is implicated,
as a point of contact or measure. Even the smallest
paper collages - The Valley Is Deep & Its Walls Tall,
and the Constellation and Firmament works - map
time, chance, memory, topography, and relational
space through folded, stitched and layered surfaces.
In relation to Burri, we feel the poetry of scarred
surfaces; to Tàpies, the resonance of humble matter;
to Beuys, the gesture as ritual; to Bourgeois, the
intimate excavation of self; to Abramović, the body
as conduit for thresholds and endurance. To Kiefer’s
ruins and accumulations, echoing the folding of
history, memory and the earth into form. Here,
making is at once an offering, a confrontation, a
listening and a reckoning.
To enter is to move lightly, to notice, to linger,
to allow the work to unfold on its own terms. A
Firework for Vincent is at once a self-portrait and
a constellation, a memory and a possibility, a light
cast into the darkened field of what might have
been. It is a place where what is broken, buried or
absent is neither lost nor explained, but becomes
a site of transformation, a threshold of perception
and an invitation to inhabit the invisible.
Joseph Clarke, 2026
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“The Flowing Stream
Melting begets melting: an invisible stream silently runs
beneath blankets of snow - wearing away, little by little,
until the point of collapse. Generation...”
Facing North
wood, cotton, thread, wool, dowel, beeswax, limestone
on edited found support
42 h x 40 w x 25 d cm
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Receiver
copper gauze, wooden clamp, beeswax, dowel, cotton,
thread, limestone
21.5 h x 12.5 w x 15 d cm
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“...There is an equilibrium to all things. This is not
static but made up of moving parts. The erosion of
walls; what do the surfaces of these walls feel like?
Are they smooth and slippery to the touch, or are
they rough and jagged? Is there friction or congruity?
Of course, this can never exist without fractions
of both...”
Dawn Forms
industrial rubber, wood, cotton, pigment, beeswax,
resin, thread
157 h x 58 w x 10 d cm
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Untitled (The Reliable Narrator)
bone, wood, thread, chalk distemper, beeswax
28.5 h x 13 w x 10 d cm
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“...Always there is a rising and falling, domination and
submission, resisting and an entering, with each part
existing as an active agency. Neutrality is no longer of
relevance in this sense. Each aspect simply coexists; each
mutually exclusive, interdependent, and ultimately come
to settle under the weight of conversation, and only in
part owing to my hand. It is these forces that in a large
part determine character - the coexistence of opposing and
sympathetic elements.”
Untitled (Eloquence)
wood, linen canvas, lead, cotton, wool, chalk distemper,
beeswax, resin, thread, fastenings, bramble, oil
22 h x 38 w x 18 d cm
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A Measure of Constance
wood, limestone, leather, cotton, thread, beeswax,
resin, distemper, pigment, graphite
30 h x 19 w x 12 d cm
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Reliquary
lead, wool, cotton, chalk distemper, thread, filler,
(form cast from vintage barquette mould)
10.5 h x 21 w x 24.5 d cm
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Untitled (Fugitive Device)
wood, lead, cotton gauze, pigment, wool, beeswax,
resin, fastenings
37 h x 24 w x 4 d cm
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“Enclave
One is offered glimpses of the outside, always premature
- recovered parts pieced together - then a zooming in; a
pressing of silence, compressed and protracted. The birds
scatter, but where do they land?..”
The Valley Is Deep & Its Walls Tall (Confluence)
wax, pigment on folded & stitched tracing paper
75 x 60 cm
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The Valley Is Deep & Its Walls Tall (Journey)
wax, pigment on folded & stitched tracing paper
76.5 x 56 cm
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The Valley Is Deep & Its Walls Tall (Centring)
wax, pigment on folded & stitched tracing paper
27 x 36.5 cm
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“... I place myself in between the land and you. This land also
belongs to you, though I know it is hard to know. There is no
longer distance?..”
Firmament (i)
antique engravings on paper, thread
22 x 21 cm
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Firmament (ii)
antique engravings on paper, thread
26 x 21 cm
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“...It was noticed in your wrists first; in those once
and still strong, dextrous, elegant hands that drew
the straightest of lines from one point to another. The
in-between, if only we knew. Now those points are no
longer fixed, they are far from a page, and now your
mind creates the shapes of constellations, which we
clamour to hold in our memory - to fix those points, to
build form from, and upon...”
Constellation (i)
graphite on foxed vintage paper
30 x 21 cm
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Constellation (ii)
graphite on foxed vintage paper
30 x 21 cm
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Constellation (iii)
graphite on foxed vintage paper
30 x 21 cm
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Constellation (iv)
graphite on foxed vintage paper
46.5 x 34 cm
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“Silt
To strive for the revealing of another side; a way into
opening, expansion; towards unity. Always there are
prompts; clues through both the steppingstones and tools.
A means to decipher. In nature, the sensation of a fallen
leaf upon the back of one’s hand...“
A Study of Opaque Absence
vintage paper, fibreglass scrim, cotton thread
29 x 21 cm
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Forest Floor Study
vintage paper, fibreglass scrim, feather barbs, thread
30 x 21 cm
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Untitled (Sentinel)
vintage paper, photograph, fibreglass scrim,
cotton thread
32 x 30.5 cm
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“...With this journey, I enter into an exchange with
the rhythmic pulse of a solitary wind turbine. The lone
sentry; the guardian, tethered centrally within the
tightly bound enclosure. Each time a different song is
brought into being - an initiated breath; interfacing, I
am brought back to mine. You are over there, and I am
over here, reaching out, harmonising, exchanging breath
for words that can never be fixed, and are all too often
lost to the wind...“
The Hermit
wool and cotton fibres, dyed cotton, chalk distemper,
rubber, copper, beeswax, resin, bone
112 h x 99 w x 12 d cm
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The Runner
wood, copper, cotton & wool fibres, cotton, chalk
distemper, rubber, thread, beeswax, resin, fastenings
99 h x 27 w x 25 d cm
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The Watchful (To Ira)
wood, copper, wool & cotton fibres, cotton,
chalk distemper, thread, beeswax, resin
37 h x 47 w x 20.5 d cm
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Generator
wood, cotton, wax, thread, chalk,
kaolin, lead, beeswax, resin
34 h x 28 w x 24 d cm
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“...What is left after the flood? These memories only
breathe the residue of what came before. In the way that
silt withdraws and generates; compounded remnants of
processes no longer served, yet still integral.“
A Firework for Vincent
stitched & dyed cotton sacks, spent firework rockets,
thread, beeswax, resin, linen, hemp rope, industrial
steel tray, pillow, cotton, chalk, alexander seeds,
feathers & two channel audio
variable dimensions
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Detail from A Firework for Vincent
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Detail from A Firework for Vincent
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Biography
Jamie Mills is a multi-disciplinary artist living and
working in West Cornwall, UK. His practice is
underpinned by an investigation into the dissemination
of gesture between materiality and environments,
referencing both the internal and the external. The
work is about memory, relationships, connection and
the very act of making itself. The principal working
materials within his largely monochromatic vocabulary,
are often sourced and repurposed from natural
environments or borderlands and include salvaged
remnants of fabrics, natural pigments, as well as
inorganic matter that functions as a counterpoint to
the organic. Pared down relationships between material
narratives and process serve as allegory to psychological
or emotional states; often surrounding memory, grief,
and an exploration into the embodiment of these
processes on a personal and universal level. These
concerns facilitate a distillation of form that exists at a
threshold between the abstract and the concrete, reflecting
a space in which a minutia of gesture and a humility of
material can communicate vital expressions of intimacy
and connection. His images, assemblages and intuitively
composed sound works can be viewed as markers to
a series of internal journeys or rituals informed by a
poetic dialogue between material, form, environment,
and personal histories. Jamie has collaborated
with both UK, and Internationally based artists and
filmmakers, and has work held in public and private
collections within the UK, Europe and the USA.
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Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with Jamie Mills ‘A Firework for Vincent’
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