Harland Miller

Harland Miller is a writer and artist. Born in Yorkshire, England in 1964, he studied at Chelsea School of Art, graduating in 1988 with an MA.

Miller explores the relationship between words and images—and the process of producing meaning—in his paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works.

Interested in canonical authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway and drawing influence from Ed Ruscha, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg, Miller pointedly combines text and images to comment on the frequent disconnect between representation and reality.

For one series of paintings, he transformed canvases into satirical Penguin book covers, inventing keenly witty titles—like 'The Me I Never Knew' (2009)—to send up classical literary motifs. The (often torturous) process of writing itself is the subject of another series, in which Miller covers vintage typewriters with splashes of paint, giving the works titles like, Writing is easy—all you do is feed in a sheet of white A4 paper and stare at it till your forehead bleeds (2009).