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Adam Justice-Mills
Artist & Photographer

adam.e.justicemills@googlemail.com

Adam's blog site

Adam's Gallery site

mob: 07970 838 188

21, Beech Drive
East Finchley
London N2 9NX

Adam Justice-Mills

Adam Justice-Mills uses paint, photos and pixels, creating abstract layered pictures, concentrating on recalled movement, structure and colour. Adam's earlier works in both drawing and photography were highly figurative landscapes and portraits. Over time, they became more interesting to him as he forgot their context but remembered the emotional significance he attaches to them. His "memory" drawing series are pen & pastel on paper and - most recently - layered glass. They are his exploration of how we form and recall an impression of something or someone, how their significance can be undiminished despite the forgetting of details. The relationship between the artist's memory and the subject is brought out through the repetition of a drawn line, based on a recalled pose or performance.

These delicate, evocative images rapidly emerge from subtly different takes on a recalled subject: sports and dance, play, day-to-day living.

Adam says: "This year I've taken my interest in memory, as artistic inspiration, and applied it to my photographic work. What interests me about memories is how they work - what triggers recollection and association of ideas, how much can we remember from a tiny stimulus, why do we remember some things and not others, what makes some things important to remember.

For me, photography is about what's real, the experience of seeing something specific but particularly the reaction that causes in me, akin to the reaction I get when I'm drawing from memory. Photographing something is about a series of immediate choices - framing and composition, choice over the amount of light, deciding what matters.

I thought: "how can I photograph memories?" and came up with this process. I wanted to explore real places that people remember, so I asked several people to each tell me about their favourite place. We talked about specifics of time of day, what they could see and hear in that place, what they remembered about it, why it was important to them, what they felt about it. I wrote down their own phrases, recording unusual words, capturing the essence of their recollections.

Some time later I reviewed what I had written, trying to remember the emotions they had expressed, the feelings they had about their favourite place, how they described it. As I was remembering, I also recalled pictures I had taken that seemed to have visually poetic connections to what they had said. These connections were sometimes direct (a tree for a tree, bubbles in water) and sometimes synaesthetic* (a colour for a sound or emotion, a texture for a level of complexity). As I looked for those remembered images from my archive of photographs, sometimes I saw parts of images, sometimes combinations of images. I was considering whether they truly were evocative of what the person had said and those that were became source materials for the collage."

You can order photographic prints through his photo gallery here.

His stained glass memorial work and murals were commissions from Martin Primary School and were the start of using glass and increased scale in his artwork.

Previous exhibitions: Lauderdale House, Tavistock Centre, EFO Summer Open and Winter Art Shows.

Adam tutors in a range of subjects. See his profile here.

The following slide show is a year-long journey down the road where he lives, which is his own favourite place.