Chris Miller

Based in his Bristol studio, Chris has spent many years exploring the versatility of textiles. His practice spans the creation of garments, quilts, dolls, and masks to intricate artworks and sculptural pieces crafted from withy and natural fibres. He is particularly drawn to the tactile process of mark-making, employing techniques such as batik, lino-printing, stencilling, and pen-and-ink to transform fabric surfaces.

In 2014, a visit to galleries in Brussels and Amsterdam introduced Chris to CoBrA—a mid-20th-century avant-garde movement named after its founding cities. Inspired by their "anti-art" philosophy and spontaneous approach, he felt a strong creative pull to integrate these ideas into his own work. This passion led him to the University of the West of England in 2015, where he completed a part-time Master’s in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking. Over three years, he refined his expertise in colour theory, design, and modern fabrication techniques like laser-cutting.

“My life has been spent in large cities, the complex urban  landscape.  Metropolitan technologies, changes, colours, movement are bewitching, powerful, dynamic and hard.  Our need for escape, comfort, seclusion and the natural world create tension and stress, emphasising our incongruous industrial situation.  Textiles, soft and strong seductively connect the natural and synthetic, the hand and the machine, the intimate and the distant; they have a near infinite variety of form and use and we are literally surrounded by them from birth.  Even the smallest scraps of fabric are an endless source of wonder to me and  I love creating with them.”