Garry Fabian Miller Exhibition Opens at Kestle Barton

An exhibition of new work by internationally recognised artist Garry Fabian Miller will open at Kestle Barton in Manaccan later this month.

Titled Our Garden. Growing. Making. Living, the exhibition will run from 28th March to 14th June 2026 and will showcase a series of camera-less photographs created by Garry Fabian Miller.

Garry Fabian Miller has spent more than four decades exploring light, colour and time through photography. The new exhibition focuses on work created directly from the artist’s garden, which he developed with his partner Naomi on the edge of Dartmoor.

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A Garden That Inspired the Work

The landscape that inspired the photographs spans what Garry Fabian Miller describes as “15 acres of meadows, orchards, ponds and woodland”.

The works shown in the exhibition come from the artist’s daily engagement with this environment and reflect what he calls “a deeply personal response to a place”.

Over time, the garden has evolved alongside the surrounding landscape.

As Garry Fabian Miller explains:

“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.”

Photography Without a Camera

Instead of using a camera, Garry Fabian Miller creates his images by placing plants and translucent materials directly onto light sensitive photographic paper.

He describes the process in his own words:

“Pictures were made directly from the plants and trees. 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.”

Art and Land at Kestle Barton

The exhibition sits naturally within the wider setting of Kestle Barton, where the gardens and surrounding fields are also cultivated as part of the gallery’s programme.

Garry Fabian Miller’s work often connects art with landscape beyond the darkroom. His projects include Three Acres of Colour, an ongoing project on a farm in Wiltshire where dye plants are grown in fields to create strong blocks of colour. He has also collaborated with Dovecot Studios and Dash + Miller and Bristol Weaving Mill to translate photographic imagery into tapestry.

Publication and Opening Event

The exhibition will also see the release of a new publication titled Our Garden, which brings together images of the garden alongside selected works from the exhibition and includes an essay written by the artist.

To mark the opening, Garry Fabian Miller will take part in a conversation with Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford.