Melanie Miller

An eclipse is an obscuring and a revealing, a momentary disappearance, a returning, a half glimpse a flicker a slippage. An eclipse occurs when an object is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of a body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. An eclipse is a shadow, a memory returning, a revealing, an eclipse is transient, momentary, unnerving, primal, extraordinary, celestial. An eclipse is the collective noun for Moths. drawn to light but defined by dark.

Melanie Miller’s Eclipse solo exhibition brings together a new body of oil on gesso paintings which are quintessentially Miller, complex surfaces with built up layers of paint. This also marks a venture into sculpture in her new Raku ceramic works in an exhibition that explores observation, transience and our shifting relationship with the natural world.

This new body of work has been developed from personal encounters and associations gathered through walking, looking and sustained attention in the countryside that surrounds her. Miller is drawn to the intimacy of rivers and to the darker, more mysterious places inland, where she can feel immersed within nature rather than simply looking at it.

Across the seasons, Miller observes changing plants and the insects and birds they host, as well as the subtle shifts that mark the passing of time; her new Raku moths are an ode to this seasonal metamorphosis as well as a shift into a new realm of artistic practise for the artist herself.

At the heart of Eclipse is an interest in thresholds and edges: hedgerows, woodland margins, riverbanks and the boundaries between cultivated and wild places. These are spaces of transition where order and chance, containment and encroachment, human intervention and natural processes meet. They are also places where species overlap and stories accumulate, offering a way to consider our own place within the wider continuum of the natural world.

Scarcity and fleeting appearances lend certain plants, fungi, insects and birds an enigmatic quality. Their transience gives them a poetic presence, connecting the immediate experience of the natural world with folklore, ancient memory and lived experience. Miller’s paintings are not illustrations of nature, but responses to it, bringing together scientific knowledge, local history, personal memory, symbolic associations, ritual use and aesthetic experience. The paintings are ultimately meditations on the ephemeral.

Drawing on the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish still-life painting, in which the transience and imperfections of life were carefully recorded, Miller considers how every encounter is temporary while also forming part of a much longer continuum of ecological and geological time. Through painting, fleeting moments become places to hold thought, memory and attention, inviting a slower way of seeing and a deeper appreciation of the quiet significance of the living world.

Melanie Miller has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, This is her 5th solo exhibition with Long and Ryle. She has shown at Le Salon Vert, Geneva, Pamela Salisbury Gallery New York, Her work has been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on numerous occasions, She was shortlisted for the ‘Contemporary British Painting Prize’ in 2023. Columbia Threadneedle Prize 2009.

Recent group exhibitions include ‘On the way to the Well’ Newlyn Art gallery ‘Snakes Snails and the Forest Floor’ and ‘All Small’ Pamela Salisbury Gallery New York. In 2025 Melanie was commissioned to design a wine label for the prestigious vineyard at Castiglion Del Bosco Italy to commemorate the year of the snake.

Long & Ryle will be featuring the following artists at the 2025 fair: Nick Archer, Hugh Buchanan, Lottie Cole, Cliona Doyle, Ramiro Fernandez Saus, Neisha Crosland, Melanie Miller, Kate Montgomery,...