About

James Millichamp is an artist, curator and educator working in Shropshire and the West Midlands. His work is all about process, taking inspiration from the surroundings; imagery is distorted into visual poems or songs. Millichamp’s artistic practice employs various processes, including painting, drawing, print and cyanotype.

In the work linear elements are minimal, almost illustrative, providing the viewer the opportunity to interpret and populate the scene. The aim is to create the sensation of being in a landscape, rather than a literal description of it. This pastoral work has developed on from a fascination for the built environment, and particularly urban decay and dereliction.

The imagery captures the atmosphere of a space, alluding to lost history through the process of change. An empty space or disused building can act as a symbol for the temporaneous nature of mankind’s achievements, or as a metaphor for solitude. Vacant environments are documented; places, devoid of human life, freeze and reaffirm human existence. Elements are deleted, obliterated or obscured. By redacting essential aspects of a scene (a line, the form, a detail) the thing described becomes lost, vague, but also more present. It is the absence of selective detail that engages – the sparsity in the work, that which is missing, forces the on-looker to fill in the gaps, facilitating a unique reading of the image, as the viewer actively experiences it. If you depict an absence, you simultaneously reveal the presence.

Man standing in front of colorful abstract paintings, wearing a navy suit and glasses, smiling.

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