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Viv MILLER I'm often struck by the impossibility that faces you when you endeavour to make an image of something, be it something seen, an idea or a sensation. The best you can do is fall back upon whatever systems of representation might be at hand and remain obliquely detached from your subject. This is where I find my space - playing right into this conundrum; but with a nod and a wink, as if administering tricks and fakery. In whatever I do, there's an interest in the various pictorial spaces and textures that can be built within a painting, ranging from the realistic to the flat, and the painterly to the plastic. Much of my work focuses on natural imagery, and I enjoy treating my subject with an attention to the artificiality of the pictures I make. I wanted to paint a volcano because I was interested in its ability to suggest the epic and the sublime, death and terror, but also to evoke the memory of TV documentaries, pages out of National Geographic, or of posters blu-tacked to the walls of a childhood bedroom. I've never seen a real volcano, and the image in Volcano painting is a fabrication; created in part from something I've imagined and from a few different sources found on the internet. I'm interested in this sense of disconnection. The pictorial properties of Volcano painting consciously reflect this situation too; realism gives way to a flattening of abstracted space; the sky is an impossible gloss enamel and the ash bits falling and breaking up the picture plane are just casual, thick daubs of paint. This is an image that has at its heart the notion of the sublime; with its challenge of representing the vast and un-representable.
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