BRITTANY MILLER
Brittany Miller’s paintings depict moments of transformation, drawing on imagery of Saints, ancient pilgrimage sites and personal encounters. Hailing from a Fundamentalist Christian background Miller focuses on finding moments of magic and transcendence outside of religion. Poetry plays a role for the artist, who first found that feeling in a book of Adrienne Rich poems.
Miller’s paintings are built by careful linear marks that spread from a central point. In early work, imagery was pulled from her childhood bible colouring books and the paintings continue to carry this scratchy quality. There's something to the structured play of a colouring book that's almost ritualistic, which is present in Miller's methodical mark-making. These give a vibrational quality to the paintings that ripples outward, particularly in Grace, 2024, a self-portrait of the artist that pulses with the marks. Caught in reverie, the figure seems to be on the cusp of shifting into something ‘other’, in the moments of ‘knowing’ something we cannot see or comprehend.
In Wild Plum, 2024 a bed shifts between itself and a cave while the figure central to the painting is posed in the ‘Assumption of Mary’. The Cave is an important part of religious imagery, they’re the mouths to the underworld and tombs for the dead. But also, a womb, the sight of resurrection, places where oracles communicate with the Gods and our earliest forms of shelter. Beds are similar in this way, a place where we are both born and laid to rest. Where we dream and prophesize. Miller considers the cave of St Patrick, once known as the physical location of purgatory, where people were said to have visions and encounter the devil. The visions were likely caused by sensory deprivation and poisonous gases but were real in that they changed the people who witnessed them. In Wild Plum, 2024 these gases surround the figure in a saintly glow as, seemingly enlightened, they await ‘something’ from above.
This imagery of Saints persists throughout Miller's practice. In Baptism, 2024 Miller depicts an intimate moment with a friend at a waterfall, reading poetry and pouring water over each other's heads in a quasi-baptism. In Christianity, Baptism symbolises rebirth, washing away the sins of a past life. Here, it feels like a healing act, where poetry is an incantation to enact change. The painting is mid-baptism, between the figure's current state of being and the next as she is illuminated by a ‘saint's halo’.
