This is a year to celebrate … reaching a half century for me, the artist, and a decade, for this little gallery. Over the past four or five years the gallery had slowly sunk under an every increasing demand for miniatures & hobby supplies, and so the balance needed to be redressed. I think I definitively found my art space again. No more visitors wondering where the gallery is, I hope …

It’s a time for looking back – at things I’d achieved, and then forgotten about once the work was wrapped, packed and stored. Hopefully seeing it out again gives me a push towards a future as a maker of things? We will see.

I’ve a dislike of exhibition over-explanation, so I won’t do it here. Suffice to say, my artwork is about a simple enjoyment of shape, colour, light, form … there’s no deeper meaning to search for, and I don’t think there needs to be. Often work is titled after the fact, in reference to what it reminds me of. But I never start a piece thinking ‘I’ll make a Peacock’, for example. Work has tended to be led by the materials available, or worked up in series from a simple starting point. So please, enjoy the images and objects for what they are, see in them what you want to see … I’m sure they won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I was relieved to see, on getting them into the gallery, that they have a something which marks them as my own.

Thanks for taking a look.

Mark Milnes

Creative Arts Hub Director / Mirfield Miniatures shopkeeper / Artist

May 2023