College Lane Gallery presents Red Dust, an exhibition of painting and sculpture by Nick Miller, the artist’s first solo presentation in Dublin since 2018, at the not-for-profit gallery and studio space in the medieval Old College, Howth, Co. Dublin.

Saturday 16 May, 4pm – 6pm: Exhibition Opening Party

Saturday 6 June, 3pm; Architect John Tuomey talks to Nick Miller at College Lane Gallery 

The exhibition brings together two streams of Miller’s practice which itself spans over 40 years. The paintings for which he is better known, and new sculptural forms that have arisen from a less intentional place, these are accreted and assembled from the residue of the studio life itself. Solidified sediment from cleaning brushes, pages of notes compressed into object-hood, paint scrapings from works in transition, found steel elements rescued from the surrounding yard; these forms have grown, in the artist’s words, “almost by themselves, like stalagmites and stalactites.”

Miller has worked for approaching twenty years in his current windowless warehouse studio beneath Benbulben in Co. Sligo, set within the compound of a rural steel-fabrication business. The landscape of rusting industrial debris that surrounds the studio, juxtaposed with the raw power of the western seaboard, alongside his daily practice of Qi Gong, has shaped both the material and philosophical character of his work.

The exhibition takes its title from a Taoist concept describing the human or social world of confusion, desire, and distraction through which each person may find their path. As Miller writes: “There is no perfect way to describe what Taoists call the world of “Red Dust”. It refers to all things that obscure our way as we navigate the struggles and structures of life including patterns of upbringing, culture and circumstance buried so deep and apparently insistent in their reality.”

College Lane Gallery is a distinctive venue, the exhibition is visible from the street and visitors can make arrangements to enter for a closer look at works. Its site carries an indefinable creative freedom rooted in history and learning that Miller found sympathetic to these particular works and to his practice in general which leans into new experiences, materials, and the effects of these combined as a way to process and to be present in a volatile world.